[Reliability of the novel gait analysis system RehaWatch]

Quantitative gait analysis plays an important role in neurological and orthopedic rehabilitation regarding the evaluation of rehabilitation progress. However, most of the currently available gait analysis systems share the disadvantage of being expensive, time-consuming, and complex. A promising alternative is the portable gait analysis system RehaWatch. It is based on inertial sensors that allow the quantitative measurement of the important kinemetric variables acceleration and angular velocity. The associated software analyzes the sensor signals and calculates temporal (e.g., stride duration, gait phases) and spatial (e.g., stride length, foot angle) parameters on this basis. The aim of this study was to investigate the intraobserver reliability of RehaWatch. A total of 44 healthy subjects (age: 27.7±4.2 years) were included in the study. Each participant underwent three measurements (walking distance: 20 m) for each of the three sessions with a time interval of 48 h in-between. Variance analysis (General Linear Model) revealed no significant differences between gait parameters at different measuring points. ICCs (Average Measure Intraclass Correlations) were between 0.691 and 0.959. In addition to the results of the variance and correlation analysis the Bland-Altman plots suggest high reliability.