Abstract
The calculation of symmetry in amputee gait is a valuable tool to assess the functional aspects of lower limb prostheses and how it impacts the overall gait mechanics. This paper analyzes the vertical trajectory of the body center of mass (CoM) of a group formed by transfemoral amputees and non-amputees to quantitatively compare the symmetry level of this parameter for both cases. A decomposition of the vertical CoM into discrete Fourier series (DFS) components is performed for each subject’s CoM trajectory to identify the main components of each pattern. A DFS-based index is then calculated to quantify the CoM symmetry level. The obtained results show that the CoM displays different patterns along a gait cycle for each amputee, which differ from the sine-wave shape obtained in the non-amputee case. The CoM magnitude spectrum also reveals more coefficients for the amputee waveforms. The different CoM trajectories found in the studied subjects can be thought as the manifestation of developed compensatory mechanisms, which lead to gait asymmetries. The presence of odd components in the magnitude spectrum is related to the asymmetric behavior of the CoM trajectory, given the fact that this signal is an even function for a non-amputee gait. The DFS-based index reflects this fact due to the high value obtained for the non-amputee reference, in comparison to the low values for each amputee.
Highlights
Most of the people who have suffered from amputation and become users of lower limb prostheses tend to maximize the capacities of the contralateral limb to counteract the limitations of the prosthetic device
The trajectory corresponds to the mean curve of a single gait cycle for each trial of the entire control group, where the initial contacts of the same limb were taken as the initial and the final point of the stride
The highest value occurs at midstance of the trailing leg, and it is repeated at the same instant in the contralateral limb
Summary
Most of the people who have suffered from amputation and become users of lower limb prostheses tend to maximize the capacities of the contralateral limb to counteract the limitations of the prosthetic device These compensatory strategies may result in serious consequences that could yield new physical impairments, like osteoarthritis on the joints of the intact limb [1,2], osteopenia and osteoporosis on the amputee limb [3], as well as low back pain [4]. Asymmetries on amputees have been often investigated in terms of spatio-temporal variables [6,7], joint kinematics [8,9], joint kinetics [10,11], and GRF [6,7,12] In these works, the assessment of the symmetry level is mostly calculated using the symmetry index, originally proposed by [13].
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