Basic Data of Gait Analysis and Clinical Applications

Abstract

It is well known that gait analysis is being widely used in western countries for the purpose of diagnosis, treatment and clinical research in the fields of orthopaedics and traumatology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, neurology and sports medicine. The purpose of this article is to present the basic outputs, the techniques utilised in the hardware and software, as well as the fields of application of gait analysis, which is relatively new to this country. In addition to high installation costs, one major hindrance for the widespread application of gait analysis seems to be the experience and technical skill required for its use, and the need to establish interaction between engineering and medicine fields for the evaluation and interpretation of its results. Along these lines, the basic techniques utilised for the gait analysis system developed in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the METU is summarised, the results obtained from the test conducted on a normal subject is presented, and the way in which the results can be interpreted in the related medical fields is discussed.