A Position based Kinematic Method for the Analysis of Human Gait

Human joint motion can be kinematically described in three planes, typically the frontal, sagittal, and transverse, and related to experimentally measured data. The selection of reference systems is a prerequisite for accurate kinematic analysis and resulting development of the equations of motion. Moreover, the development of analysis techniques for the minimization of errors, due to skin movement or body deformation, during experiments involving human locomotion is a critically important step, without which accurate results in this type of experiment are an impossibility. The traditional kinematic analysis method is the Angular-based method (ABM), which utilizes the Euler angle or the Bryant angle. However, this analysis method tends to increase cumulative errors due to skin movement. Therefore, the objective of this study was to propose a new kinematic analysis method, Position-based method (PBM), which directly applies position displacement data to represent locomotion. The PBM presented here was designed to minimize cumulative errors via considerations of angle changes and translational motion between markers occurring due to skin movements. In order to verify the efficacy and accuracy of the developed PBM, the mean value of joint dislocation at the knee during one gait cycle and the pattern of three dimensional translation motion of the tibiofemoral joint at the knee, in both flexion and extension, were accessed via ABM and via new method, PBM, with a Local Reference system (LRS) and Segmental Reference system (SRS), and then the data were compared between the two techniques. Our results indicate that the proposed PBM resulted in improved accuracy in terms of motion analysis, as compared to ABM, with the LRS and SRS.