Signal processing - difficult. How to extract specific parts of the signal identified via findpeaks?

Hi all,

I have a signal (attached) which is a sensor orientation y during human walking. I have identified certain indices in the signal (attached 'start'', red circles over the signal) and I am extracting parts of the signal between those indices using the code below.

However, I want to discard (ignore) part of the signal between two blue x-es (on the left at the bottom) which is a moment when a person turns around and start walking again. Any idea how to do this?

load 'signal'
load 'start'

    %This is how I indetify the indices
% Identify all troughs in data
    [all_trough_value,all_trough_location]= findpeaks(-thigh_orient_y, 'MinPeakProminence',7);
    all_trough_value = -all_trough_value;
    
% Identify main trough (i.e. main peaks with a prominence of at least 10)
    [main_trough_value,main_trough_location]= findpeaks(thigh_orient_y,'MinPeakProminence',15);
 
% Identify first local minima before main through (start of the cycle)
    counter = 0;
    for i = 1:length(main_trough_location)
        index = find(all_trough_location < main_trough_location(i),1,'last');
        if isempty(index)
            continue
        end
        counter = counter + 1;
        start_location(counter) = all_trough_location(index);               % find start location
        start_value(counter) = all_trough_value(index);                     % find start value
    end

    %Settings
T_or_y = thigh_orient_y;
a = start_location;
n = length(a)-1;   
T_or_y_cycle = cell(n,1) ;

    %Fill in cells with signal between the indices
for i = 1:n  
    T_or_y_cycle{i} = T_or_y(a(i):a(i+1)) ;   
end

%Plot all over one figure
figure;
hold on
for i = 1:length(T_or_y_cycle)
    plot(T_or_y_cycle{i},'r') ;
    title('RThigh orientation Y'); xlabel('% of movement cycle'); ylabel('degrees')
    box off; axis tight;
end

Ideally, the solution should work also for walking on the stairs (walk up twice and walk down twice)/ attached 'signal 2' and 'start2'

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

What does "discard" mean to you? Do you just want to set them to the min value?

% Create a mask
mask = some function that will be easier if you have the Image Processing Toolbox.
signal(mask) = min(signal);

Or maybe just remove those elements so the second part is stitched onto the first part

signal(mask) = [];

In either case you have to create a mask that identifies the parts you want to discard. You might be able to use movmax() with an appropriate window size, then threshold and use bwareafilt() from the Image Processing Toolbox to identify runs of a certain length. If you don't have that toolbox you can probably inspect the spacing betwee peaks and if it's too long, delete the elements in between.