Comparison of two normative paediatric gait databases

Victoria L Chester¹ , Maureen Tingley² and Edmund N Biden³

¹Faculty of Kinesiology, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5A3, Canada

²Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5A3, Canada

³Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5A3, Canada

author email corresponding author email

Dynamic Medicine 2007, 6:8doi:10.1186/1476-5918-6-8


Published:	17 July 2007

Abstract

The availability of age-matched normative data is an essential component of clinical gait analyses. Comparison of normative gait databases is difficult due to the high-dimensionality and temporal nature of the various gait waveforms. The purpose of this study was to provide a method of comparing the sagittal joint angle data between two normative databases. We compared a modern gait database to the historical San Diego database using statistical classifiers developed by Tingley et al. (2002). Gait data were recorded from 60 children aged 1–13 years. A six-camera Vicon 512 motion analysis system and two force plates were utilized to obtain temporal-spatial, kinematic, and kinetic parameters during walking. Differences between the two normative data sets were explored using the classifier index scores, and the mean and covariance structure of the joint angle data from each lab. Significant differences in sagittal angle data between the two databases were identified and attributed to technological advances and data processing techniques (data smoothing, sampling, and joint angle approximations). This work provides a simple method of database comparison using trainable statistical classifiers.