Method of Clinical Gait Analysis

The basic concept of clinical gait analysis is to study human motion. The movements of a patient’s body are observed by an examiner using his eyes and brain. Hence in order to measure the body mechanics and the muscle movements an instrument is used thereby augmenting the analysis. The clinical gait analysis is helpful in analyzing an individual’s movements who is suffering from hindered body motions. This method is also used over sports personnel with that he can perform even better.

A person’s gait pattern is measured through clinical gait analysis using specialized technique of motion capture. In order to perform this analysis medical background of a patient is taken into records. Only after consideration of the entire details one can arrive at final decision. A clinical gait analysis is done using following procedure. Read more on motion capture

A videotape:

This is the first step of examination in which a patient is asked to walk barefooted on a smooth pathway and his or her movement is carefully examined. A videotape is used for this motion capture through which one can obtain the entire details of a person’s motion. Obtaining the motion capture in a videotape assists in examining the fluidity of gait pattern.

Physical Examination:

The next step is the process of physical examination. The person is examined while he or she is resting. The muscle tone, strength and the joint motion of lower portion is analyzed. Along with this bone deformity, neurological and muscular contractions are measured and examined. These measurements are then compared with the motion capture reports of a patient. This helps the examiner to explore the reason behind the deformity in gait movements. Due to variable factors such as gravity and body motions, the physical examination is never accurate. Such factors are responsible for alterations in functional demands and hence fail to support the manual examination.

Motion capture:

Apart from clinical gait analysis there are several other technique used to analyze gait movement of a person. In motion capture process, the physical movements are captured that are converted into digital mode. This technique is used by the doctors to examine body motion through biometric readings.

Passive reflective markers highlight different points of a patient. When the patient is made to walk on the smooth path, the doctors carefully monitor the positions of a marker using 3D motion data capture system. This system is an assembly of many specialized cameras.

Institutional Standards:

Clinical gait analysis is not uniform everywhere. And all the laboratories are not equipped with 3D body marker data capture system. Such labs adopt bit inferior technique to perform clinical gait analysis. They rely on assumptions considering that the rotations occur on sagittal body plane. This shows that the gait motions are captured through side view operations. Such labs stick to video recording and analyzing few gait strokes such as length of a step, stride length, cadence and velocity.