From gait disorders to gait analysis

Medical scholarship about gait disorders blossomed in the nineteenth century: locomotor ataxia in tabetic neurosyphilis (Romberg, Gowers, and Charcot); the festinating gait of Parkinson’s disease, and so many others. In the same time appeared the measurement of locomotion in the modern sense: firstly by applying photography (Muybridge), and secondly by combining kinematic and kinetic locomotor measurements (Marey). In the middle of the twentieth century the Berkeley group led by Saunders, Inman and Sutherland launched a Biomechanics Laboratory dedicated to clinical applications (prosthesis). Gait laboratories are now worldwide available using simultaneously kinematic, kinetic and myoelectric measurements; they deal with clinical applications of gait analysis, but they are still expensive and time consuming. There is a lack in an ambulatory gait analysis system suitable in routine practice for clinicians. Gait analysis method