The purpose of this study is to develop a gait-event detection system, which is necessary for the cycle-to-cycle FES control of locomotion. Proposed gait event detection system consists of a signal measurement part and gait event detection part. The signal measurement was composed of the sensors and the LabVIEW program for the data acquisition and synchronization of the sensor signals. We also used a video camera and a motion capture system to get the reference gait events. Machine learning technique with ANN (artificial neural network) was adopted for automatic detection of gait events. 2 cycles of reference gait events were used as the teacher signals for ANN training and the remnants (2∼5 cycles) were used for the evaluation of the performance in gait-event detection. 14 combinations of sensor signals were used in the training and evaluation of ANN to examine the relationship between the number of sensors and the gait-event detection performance. The best combinations with minimum errors of event-detection time were 1）goniometer, foot-switch and 2）goniometer, foot-switch, accelerometer x(anterior-posterior) component. It is expected that the result of this study will be useful in the design of cycle-to-cycle FES controller.
