This article describes the balanced combination of medical history, detailed physical examination, functional assessment, imaging, observational gait analysis, computerized gait analysis, and assessment of patient and family goals that are necessary to prepare treatment plans and accurately assess outcomes of treatment of children with cerebral palsy.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Functional walk tests such as the 6- and 12-Minute Walk Test (ie, 6MWT and 12MWT, respectively) are submaximal measures used to determine functional capacity in individuals with compromised ability. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between these walk tests and measures of exertion (perceived and myocardial), in addition to impairment in individu...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to assess the impact of postural deformities caused by ankylosing spondylitis (AS) on balance problems. MATERIAL AND METHODS This study included 29 patients with AS and 21 healthy controls. For assessing exercise capacity and dynamic balance, timed up and go test, five times sit-to-stand test, gait speed, and 6-min walk test were performed. Romberg tests were used t...

BACKGROUND The addition of functional electrical stimulation (FES) to treadmill gait training with partial body weight support (BWS) has been proposed as a strategy to facilitate gait training in people with hemiparesis. However, there is a lack of studies that evaluate the effectiveness of FES addition on ground level gait training with BWS, which is the most common locomotion surface. OBJEC...

[Purpose] Lower-limb spasticity after stroke may be associated with worse functional outcome. Our study aim was to establish whether a low-dose botulinum toxin A (BTX-A) injection in subacute stroke patients can improve spasticity, gait, and daily living abilities. [Subjects] Twenty-three subacute stroke patients were randomly allocated to BTX-A treatment group (11 patients) and control group (...

The quantitative assessment of the change of gait symmetry has played a very important role in the clinical diagnostics. This paper investigated the application of an advanced hybrid machine learning approach such as the combining kernel-based principal component analysis (KPCA) with support vector machine (SVM) to evaluate the change of gait symmetry quantitatively based on the basic idea that...

Quantitative gait analysis can provide a description of joint kinematics and dynamics, and it is recognized as a clinically useful tool for functional assessment, diagnosis and intervention planning. Clinically interpretable parameters are estimated from quantitative measures (i.e. ground reaction forces, skin marker trajectories, etc.) through biomechanical modelling. In particular, the estima...

BACKGROUND Functional decline is a primary risk factor for institutionalization and mortality among older adults. Although community-based fall risk reduction programs have been widely disseminated, little is known about their impact on gait speed, a key indicator of functional performance. Changes in functional performance between baseline and post-intervention were examined by means of timed ...

This paper reports on a functional evaluation of prosthetic feet based on gait analysis. The aim is to analyse prosthetic feet behaviour under loads applied during gait in order to quantify user benefits for each foot. Ten traumatic amputees (six trans-tibial and four trans-femoral) were tested using their own prosthetic foot. An original protocol is presented to calculate the forefoot kinemati...