INTEGRATED GAIT ANALYSIS FOR FUTURE ROUTI NE CLINICAL-APPLICATIONS

To describe the phenomenon of human movement by means of kinematic and kinetic measurements in a more objective manner, socalled integrated gait analysis systems have been developed. Although the commercially a vailable equipment has already reached high technical levels, it does not play an important role in routine clinical applications. Due to th is fact, the main arguments of the practitioners still address the pra cticability of the devices as well as the lack of meaningful software support for data assessment. The former concern has led to the integra tion of two KISTLER platforms beneath a treadmill belt in order to con tinuously capture 3D ground reaction force data. The latter one has pr ompted the development of an additional software kit, which statistica lly preprocesses the raw data set for further computations and which s hould prospectively allow a detailed analysis with artificial intellig ence techniques. This new software becomes even more meaningful from t he practitioner's point of view, because it may also be used as a stan dalone unit for a preliminary assessment of gait patterns. The first p art deals with the design of integrating two KISTLER platforms beneath the treadmill belt. A description of the analysis software follows, w hich removes noise, especially the influence of friction, from the raw data set. Thereby the 3D ground reaction force, which is originally c aused by the patient while walking, is reconstructed. Preliminary resu lts are presented. In the second part methods of automatically preproc essing the kinematic data set are focused upon.