A Computer Based Method to Assess Gait Data

The aim of Instrumented Gait Analysis is to support clinicians’ decision making process concerning diagnosis and treatment strategies. Movement Analysis systems are used to measure data such as joint kinematics or kinetics during gait in a quantitative way. However, data evaluation is performed subjectively by experienced physicians for a specific clinical problem (diagnose individual disabilities in the locomotor system, plan and validate therapies). There is a growing need for methods for objective, standardized data analysis even in case of individual variations in the very complex gait pathologies. This article covers the development of a modular, computer-based methodology to quantify the degree of pathological gait in comparison to normal behaviour, as well as to automatically search for interpretable gait abnormalities and to visualize the results. The successful application of the novel methods to a group of CP (Infantile cerebral palsy) patients is demonstrated.