Article

Instrumented treadmills are increasingly used in gait research, although the
imposed walking speed is suggested to affect gait performance.
A feedback-controlled treadmill that allows subjects to walk at their preferred
speed, i.e. functioning in a self-paced (SP) mode, might be an attractive
alternative, but could disturb gait through accelerations of the belt. We
compared SP with fixed speed (FS) treadmill walking, and also considered various
feedback modes. Nineteen healthy subjects walked on a dual-belt instrumented
treadmill. Spatio-temporal, kinematic and kinetic gait parameters were derived
from both the average stride patterns and stride-to-stride variability. For 15
out of 70 parameters significant differences were found between SP and FS. These
differences were smaller than 1cm, 1 degrees , 0.2 Nm and 0.2 W/kg for
respectively stride length and width, joint kinematics, moments and powers. Since
this is well within the normal stride variability, these differences were not
considered to be clinically relevant, indicating that SP walking is not notably
affected by belt accelerations. The long-term components of walking speed
variability increased during SP walking (43%, p<0.01), suggesting that SP allows
for more natural stride variability. Differences between SP feedback modes were
predominantly found in the timescales of walking speed variability, while the
gait pattern was similar between modes. Overall, the lack of clinically
significant differences in gait pattern suggests that SP walking is a suitable
alternative to fixed speed treadmill walking in gait analysis.
CI - Copyright (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS