Foot Pressure-based Abnormal Gait Recognition with Multi-scale Cross-Attention Fusion

Abnormal gait recognition plays a critical role in healthcare, particularly for the early diagnosis and continuous monitoring of neurological and musculoskeletal disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease and orthopedic injuries. This study proposes MSCAF-Gait, a Multi-Scale Cross-Attention Fusion Network designed specifically for abnormal gait recognition using foot pressure sensors. MSCAF-Gait incorporates multi-scale convolutional modules with channel and spatial attention mechanisms to effectively capture features across temporal, channel, and spatial dimensions. A novel cross-attention fusion module further enhances feature representation, enabling precise recognition of diverse abnormal gait patterns. To facilitate this research, we introduce the Pressure-Insole Abnormal Gait (PIAG) dataset, comprising gait data associated with common neurological and musculoskeletal abnormalities. Extensive experiments on the publicly available Gait in Parkinson’s Disease (GaitinPD) dataset and our self-constructed PIAG dataset validate the effectiveness of MSCAF-Gait. Specifically, the model achieves 99.61% accuracy in Parkinsonian gait recognition and 98.88% accuracy in Parkinson’s severity classification. On the PIAG dataset, which includes multiple abnormal gait patterns, MSCAF-Gait attains a high accuracy of 99.42%. Notably, these results are obtained with a lightweight architecture characterized by reduced FLOPs and parameter count, demonstrating that MSCAF-Gait offers both high accuracy and computational efficiency, making it well-suited for real-time deployment on wearable platforms.