Gait Features Assessment in Hip Osteoarthritis and Total Hip Replaced Patients Based on an ambulatory System (Physilog)

Osteoarthritis is the most frequent joint pathology throughout the world. Obtaining objective, dynamic and quantified data allowing the evaluation of patients’ progress before and after hip arthroplasty is crucial. Gait analysis can be used for evaluating improvement in such patients, since walking is the principal human physical activity. Comprehensive gait analysis usually includes kinematics, kinetics, and electromyography. A complex instrumentation is thus required that only can be installed in a dedicated laboratory. These techniques are valuable to support clinical decisions and to evaluate the results. However, in several instances, a simplified analysis, concentrated on few selected gait parameters, can be valuable as well. Recently, we have proposed a new ambulatory system for gait analysis (Physilog) and validated its performances for normal and abnormal walking (Aminian et al., 2002). The aim of this study is to show the efficacy of Physilog system for clinical gait analysis in orthopaedics