All you ever wanted to know about the conventional gait model but were afraid to ask

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What seems an awfully long time ago now (2003!), Jill Rodda and I gave a tutorial on the Conventional Gait Model (Davis, Newington, Helen Hayes, Kadaba, VCM, PiG – whatever you want to call it) to the Gait and Clinical Movement Analysis Society in Wilmington, Delaware. For it I prepared a CD-ROM (cover picture above) with an interactive multi-media presentation on as many aspects of the model that I could think of. This includes:

  • Description of how the different segments are defined anatomically.
  • Guidelines on marker placement.
  • Practical guidance on coping with larger people, defining the coronal plane of the femur and deformed feet.
  • An analysis of the effects of misplacing various markers
  • Limitations of the model and suggestions for the future.

Some of it appears a little dated (the future is now for instance) but for anyone who is still using the CGM (and many people are) there is still a lot of material that will be useful.

The reason that I’m posting this is that I’ve now uploaded the files to our institutional repository where they can now be freely downloaded by anyone. Click here to access the files. Extract the files to a folder somewhere on your PC, go to the sub-folder PolygonViewer and double click on the folder PolygonViewer.exe. (Which reminds me that this is probably still one of the world’s longest Polygon reports!) Once you are in the presentation I think everything should be quite intuitive.

The video above shows two clips from the presentation illustrating the equivalence of Cardan angles and the joint angles as specified using the joint coordinate system (see this paper for a more comprehensive description).