Gait analysis through inertial sensors in transfemoral amputees: Step and stride regularity

A critical issue in treating lower-limb amputees is to verify if the walking pattern learned by the patient during the supervised training (assumed as the gold standard) is maintained during the daily living. Indeed such issue dramatically influences both training duration and the correct subject-specific tuning of the prosthesis. As a possible solution we aimed to develop an inexpensive wearable system based on inertial sensors able to alert both the patient and the practitioner about gait pattern modifications with respect to the patient-specific gold standard. Following suggestions from expert clinicians and from an analysis of the literature, at this first stage of development we focused on indexes describing gait symmetry and regularity. To this regard, the aim of this work was to assess if the method proposed by Moe-Nilssen et al., based on the application of the unbiased auto-correlation, can be related to qualitative assessment of amputees’ gait by an expert physiotherapist.