Abstract
The development of on-board technologies has enabled the development of quantification systems to monitor equine locomotion parameters. Their relevance among others relies on their ability to determine specific locomotor events such as foot-on and heel-off events. The objective of this study was to compare the accuracy of different methods for an automatic gait events detection from inertial measurement units (IMUs). IMUs were positioned on the cannon bone, hooves, and withers of seven horses trotting on hard and soft straight lines and circles. Longitudinal acceleration and angular velocity around the latero-medial axis of the cannon bone, and withers dorso-ventral displacement data were identified to tag the foot-on and a heel-off events. The results were compared with a reference method based on hoof-mounted-IMU data. The developed method showed bias less than 1.79%, 1.46%, 3.45% and −1.94% of stride duration, respectively, for forelimb foot-on and heel-off, and for hindlimb foot-on and heel-off detection, compared to our reference method. The results of this study showed that the developed gait-events detection method had a similar accuracy to other methods developed for straight line analysis and extended this validation to other types of exercise (circles) and ground surface (soft surface).
Highlights
Musculoskeletal disorders are the first reason for medical consultation in horses [1].They lead to low performance and all are signs of pain and loss of well-being [2]
An innovative data processing method was developed to detect foot-on and heel-off events of horse locomotion, based on a single inertial measurement units (IMUs) located on the cannon bone of the horse, for several conditions and several surfaces
Previous study has shown a bias of less than 0.6% of the stride duration for foot-on detection and 0.1% of the stride duration for heel-off detection, for forelimbs, at the trot on treadmill, based on cannon bone IMU data sampling at 500 Hz [8]
Summary
Musculoskeletal disorders are the first reason for medical consultation in horses [1].They lead to low performance and all are signs of pain and loss of well-being [2]. The stance phase of one leg is defined as the moment between the hoof being completely laid flat on the ground (foot-on) to the take-off of the heel (heel-off) [10,11] These events can be examined visually, but the temporal resolution of the human eye limits its precise distinction [12]. Several methods based on force plate [13,14] and optical motion capture (OMC) [15,16] analysis are available to monitor these spatiotemporal events. These methods are highly reliable, they require laboratory conditions with limited exercise conditions. These conditions do not reflect the full spectrum of exercises needed by the clinician during a complete locomotor examination [17]
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