Assessing Spatiotemporally Complex and Coupled Gait Patterns Using Temporal Cross-correlation

Human gait is a spatiotemporally complex motion, where each segment and joint motion during gait is coupled across other joints. These spatiotemporal joint coupling patterns are closely associated with musculoskeletal injury mechanics, but previous tools used to examine human gait have mainly focused on univariate measures such as stride, step length, maximum range of motion, and the durations of stance and swing phases of gait. These tools are unable to capture the complex nature of human movement or assess correlated patterns of joint or segmental movement patterns within and between human limbs.