A rehabilitation treadmill with software for providing real-time gait analysis and visual feedback.

BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE Standard gait analysis techniques can be cumbersome and time consuming. Subjects must walk at a set speed, place their feet squarely on one or more force plates, and data normally cannot be collected for successive strides. Temporal, kinetic, and kinematic information collected during formal gait analyses can also be obtained from subjects walking on a motorized treadmill. The advantages of collecting these data from a treadmill are the capacity to ensure a constant gait speed, and the ability to collect data continuously. The system described in the present study can collect and analyze ten to fifteen consecutive strides of gait in as little as 20 seconds. Using conventional methods, the collection of these data (for non-consecutive strides) could easily take over an hour. It was anticipated that such a device would be an especially effective aid in a rehabilitation context where patients could receive continuous real-time visual feedback during the gait retraining process. These expectations were supported in a subsequent study, with below-knee (BK) amputees, where symmetry for three feedback parameters improved by an average of 45% after only four minutes of feedback training (Dingwell et al., 1994).