OBJECTIVE To compare kinetic measures and spatiotemporal variables assessed during walking with standard axillary crutches and spring-loaded crutches. DESIGN A repeated-measures design in which healthy subjects walked with both standard and spring-loaded crutches. SETTING Biomechanics research laboratory. PARTICIPANTS Ten healthy young adult volunteers participated. Only female volunteers...

Two cohorts of participants were included to investigate the effects of different treadmill interventions on walking onset and gait patterns in infants with Down syndrome (DS). The first cohort included 30 infants with DS (17 males, 13 females; mean age 10 mo [SD 1.9 mo]) who were randomly assigned to either a lower-intensity-generalized (LG) training group, or a higher-intensity-individualized...

BACKGROUND Patients with severe chronic heart failure seem to take shorter steps than healthy controls when walking on a treadmill and when walking freely along a corridor. In healthy individuals the pattern of walking affects the oxygen cost of exercise, and so this observation might be relevant to the limitation of exercise in heart failure. METHOD Length of stride was analysed as stride/st...

PURPOSE The purpose of our study was to investigate the functional outcome after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction using bone-patellar tendon-bone (BPTB) and quadrupled semitendinosus and gracilis tendon (ST/G) autografts by evaluating stride-to-stride variability. METHODS Six patients with BPTB and 6 patients with STG ACL reconstruction, 2 years postoperatively, and 6 healthy c...

We present a parametric method to automatically identify people in monocular low-resolution video by estimating the height and stride parameters of their walking gait. Stride parameters (stride length and cadence) are functions of body height, weight, and gender. Previous work has demonstrated effective use of these biometrics for identification and verification of people. In this paper, we sho...

At a given running speed, humans strongly prefer to use a stride frequency near their 'optimal' stride frequency that minimizes metabolic cost. Although there is no definitive explanation for why an optimal stride frequency exists, elastic energy usage has been implicated. Because the possibility for elastic energy storage and return may be impaired on slopes, we investigated whether and how th...

BACKGROUND As a way to train at faster running speeds, add training volume, prevent injury, or rehabilitate after an injury, lower-body positive pressure treadmills (LBPPT) have become increasingly commonplace among athletes. However, there are conflicting evidence and a paucity of data describing the physiological and biomechanical responses to LBPPT running in highly trained or elite caliber ...

Variability indicates motor control disturbances and is suitable to identify gait pathologies. It can be quantified by linear parameters (amplitude estimators) and more sophisticated nonlinear methods (structural information). Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) is one method to measure structural information, e.g., from stride time series. Recently, an improved method, Adaptive Fractal Analys...

BACKGROUND It has been suggested that high stride-to-stride variability (STV) is a reflection of gait instability. However, both low and high STV has been shown in fallers and in nonfallers; therefore, the interpretation of STV of spatiotemporal gait parameters remains difficult. Thus, we sought to characterize and compare STV of spatial and temporal stride parameters among young and older heal...

When a treadmill accelerates continuously, the walk-run transition has generally been assumed to occur at the instant when a flight phase is first observed, while the run-walk transition has been assumed to occur at the instant of the first double support period. There is no theoretical or empirical evidence to suggest that gait transitions occur at the instant of these events, nor even whether...