Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 18, 2026
Clinical Assessment of Spatiotemporal Gait Parameters in Patients and Older Adults
Published on: November 7, 2014
Agreement between the GAITRite walkway system and a stopwatch-footfall count method for measurement of temporal and
James W Youdas1, John H Hollman, Monica J Aalbers
1Program in Physical Therapy, Mayo School of Health Sciences, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN 55905, USA. youdas.james@mayo.edu
Objective:
To determine the agreement for measurements of stride length, cadence, and walking speed obtained from the GAITRite system and the stopwatch-footfall count technique.
Design:
Criterion standard.
Setting:
Research laboratory in a physical therapy education program.
Participants:
Forty healthy volunteers (13 men, 27 women) without lower-extremity injury.
Interventions:
Participants walked across a GAITRite mat with embedded pressure sensors at their self-selected walking speed. Simultaneously, an examiner used a stopwatch to record the elapsed time necessary to cross the mat and counted the number of complete footfalls.
Main Outcome Measures:
Walking speed, cadence, and stride-length measures were compared between the GAITRite system and the stopwatch-footfall count technique.
Results:
Correlation coefficients comparing both systems were .97 for walking speed, .75 for cadence, and .85 for stride length. Ninety-five percent of the time we would expect the between-methods differences to range between .09 and -.05m/s for walking speed, between -1.5 and -24.3 steps/min for cadence, and between .01 and .37m for stride length.
Conclusions:
This study shows that the GAITRite and stopwatch-footfall count methods lack clinically acceptable agreement for the measurements of cadence and stride length in a group of healthy volunteers walking at their self-selected speeds. Clinicians who require precise measurement of cadence and stride length should consider using the GAITRite system instead of the stopwatch-footfall count technique.
