Sorry for the late response. My senior year and many projects are currently going on!
The output data is just to determine general speed. The instructors would like to know how the walking speed correlates with the swing speed in familiar vs unfamiliar settings.
I will have to look more into the optical sensor. I briefly considered something like that but I was not sure about the accuracy given the distance from the tip to the ground would be varying constantly.
For making a pedometer, do you guys think a simple single axis accelerometer would suffice? My thought was just one in the handle measuring the up/down z axis would work since that should be triggered when a step occurs.
The other option would be a second 3 axis accelerometer and measure up/down plus forward acceleration and only count steps when both forward motion and up/down motion occur.