Validation of portable in-clinic video-based gait analysis for prosthesis users

Abstract

Despite the common focus of gait in rehabilitation, there are few tools that allow quantitatively characterizing gait in the clinic. We recently described an algorithm, trained on a large dataset from our clinical gait analysis laboratory, which produces accurate cycle-by-cycle estimates of spatiotemporal gait parameters including step timing and walking velocity. Here, we demonstrate this system generalizes well to clinical care with a validation study on prosthetic users seen in therapy and outpatient clinics. Specifically, estimated walking velocity was similar to annotated 10-m walking velocities, and cadence and foot contact times closely mirrored our wearable sensor measurements. Additionally, we found that a 2D keypoint detector pretrained on largely able-bodied individuals struggles to localize prosthetic joints, particularly for those individuals with more proximal or bilateral amputations, but after training a prosthetic-specific joint detector video-based gait analysis also works on these individuals. Further work is required to validate the other outputs from our algorithm including sagittal plane joint angles and step length. Code for the gait transformer and the trained weights are available at https://github.com/peabody124/GaitTransformer.