Article

The analysis of upper-body acceleration is a promising and simple technique to
quantitatively assess dynamic gait stability. However, this method has rarely
been used for people with stroke, probably because of some technical issues still
not addressed. We evaluated the root-mean-square (RMS) and harmonic ratio of
trunk accelerations for a group of 15 inpatients with subacute stroke who were
able to walk (61.4 +/- 14.9 yr) and compared them with those of an age-matched
group of nondisabled subjects (65.1 +/- 8.8 yr) and those of a highly functional
group of young nondisabled subjects (29.0 +/- 5.0 yr). Small (<2%) but
significant (p < 0.03) differences were found in RMS values obtained by applying
the two most common computational approaches: (1) averaging among
individual-stride RMS values and (2) computing the RMS value over the entire
walking trial without stride partitioning. We found that the intersubject
dependency of acceleration RMS values by selected walking speed was specific for
each group and for each of the three body axes. The analysis of ratios between
these three accelerations provided informative outcomes correlated with clinical
scores and not affected by walking speed. Our findings are an important step
toward transferring accelerometry from human movement analysis laboratories to
clinical settings.

Langue : ANGLAIS