Gait characteristics and pain assessment of symptomatic knee osteoarthritis

The must-have clinical criterion or main symptom associated with knee osteoarthritis (OA) is knee pain. Gait alteration usually occur mainly to compensate the pain experienced at the knee joint. It consequently causes the deterioration of functional ability and affects activity of daily. The aim of the study is to extract kinematic gait features that characterize the knee OA gait and its association with pain assessment. Eight knee OA patients and five asymptomatic subjects were recruited and kinematic and spatiotemporal features were obtained using 3D Vicon motion analysis system during gait trial. There were 13 kinematic features extracted using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and only two features which are hip flexion/extension phase shift and knee flexion/extension range of motion have significant correlation with pain assessment using ICOAP and KOOS questionnaire

Preliminary study on the use of kinect camera for observational gait analysis system

This study introduced Kinect as motion capturing device and its potential as analysis platform by developing graphical user interface (GUI) for observational gait analysis system. Spatiotemporal parameters and kinematic gait parameters of three normal individuals and two individuals with knee osteoarthritis were recorded using the proposed system and VICON system simultaneously. Correlation study were conducted between the proposed system and VICON system. The proposed system successfully generates and display the observational gait analysis results. The generated results show a strong correlation with VICON system and have no significant difference. As a conclusion, the developed system for gait analysis has high potential to be utilize in clinical settings. Some improvements should be done to increase the practicability of the system