Clinical Gait Evaluation of Patients with Lumbar Spine Stenosis

The third generation Intelligent Device for Energy Expenditure and Activity (IDEEA3, MiniSun, CA) has been developed for clinical gait evaluation, and this study was designed to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of IDEEA3 for the gait measurement of lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) patients.

Twelve healthy volunteers were recruited to compare gait cycle, cadence, step length, velocity, and number of steps between a motion analysis system and a high-speed video camera. Twenty hospitalized LSS patients were recruited for the comparison of the five parameters between the IDEEA3 and GoPro camera. Paired t-test, intraclass correlation coefficient, concordance correlation coefficient, and Bland-Altman plots were used for the data analysis.

The ratios of GoPro camera results to motion analysis system results, and the ratios of IDEEA3 results to GoPro camera results were all around 1.00. All P-values of paired t-tests for gait cycle, cadence, step length, and velocity were greater than 0.05, while all the ICC and CCC results were above 0.950 with P < 0.001.

The measurements for gait cycle, cadence, step length, velocity, and number of steps with the GoPro camera are highly consistent with the measurements with the motion analysis system. The measurements for IDEEA3 are consistent with those for the GoPro camera. IDEEA3 can be effectively used in the gait measurement of LSS patients.