Using Positional Heel-marker Data to More Accurately Calculate Stride Length for Treadmill Walking: A Step Length Approach

Treadmill walking is a convenient tool for studying the human gait; however, a common gait parameter, stride length, can be difficult to calculate directly because relevant reference points continually move backwards. Although there is no direct calculation of stride length itself, we can use positional heel-marker data to directly determine a similar parameter, step length, and we can sum two step lengths to result in one stride length. This proposed method of calculation is simple but seems to be unexplored in other literature, so this paper displays the details of the calculation. Our experimental results differed from the expected values by 2.2% and had a very low standard deviation, suggesting that this method is viable for practical use. The ability to calculate stride length for treadmill walking using heel-marker data may allow for quick and accurate gait calculations that further contribute to the versatility of heel data as a tool for gait analysis. Keywords-Gait analysis, Stride length, Step length, Treadmill walking, Vicon, heel marker