Is My Patient Improving? Individualized Gait Analysis in Rehabilitation

In the rehabilitation field, clinicians are continually struggling to assess improvements in patients following interventions. In this paper, we propose an approach to use gait analysis based on inertial motion capture (MoCap) to monitor individuals during rehabilitation. Gait is a cyclical movement that generates a sufficiently large data sample in each capture session to statistically compare two different sessions from a single patient. Using this crucial idea, 21 heterogeneous patients with hemiplegic spasticity were assessed using gait analysis before and after receiving treatment with botulinum toxin injections. Afterwards, the two sessions for each patient were compared using the magnitude-based decision statistical method. Due to the challenge of classifying changes in gait variables such as improvements or impairments, assessing each patient’s progress required an interpretative process. After completing this process, we determined that 10 patients showed overall improvement, five patients showed overall impairment, and six patients did not show any overall change. Finally, the interpretation process was summarized by developing guidelines to aid in future assessments. In this manner, our approach provides graphical information about the patients’ progress to assess improvement following intervention and to support decision-making. This research contributes to integrating MoCap-based gait analysis into rehabilitation.