Variation in human gait intervals on a treadmill

Abstract

This work resulted in the development of a novel gait timing apparatus. 'De gait timing equipment was developed for the use in the study of the global dynamics of walking human gait. It's use demonstrated the measurement of variations in the timing of human gait cycles. The accuracy of each interval measured by the timing equipment was plus or minus 2.9 milliseconds. variations in gait cycle intervals during gait at a constant speed were as high as 100 milliseconds. This gait interval data was used to investigate the dynamics of gait on a stride by stride basis. Typical gait analysis limits study to a single gait cycle. Poincare sections, and bifurcation analyses are useful tools for studying the dynamics of quasi-periodic phenomena. This suggests their use in analyzing human gait cycles and other biological oscillations. Poincare sections allow for the study of global system dynamics using only samples of data taken once in each cycle of the oscillation. The behavior in the discrete Poincare section retains many important aspects of the original system dynamics. Poincare maps thus greatly simplify the visualization and modeling of global system behaviors. In order to investigate the application of Poincare mapping and.bifurcation analysis to gait analysis, 300 gait intervals were measured at several different walking speeds. Poincare maps were constructed with the measured gait interval data. System resolution limited the analysis of the maps to qualitative comments.