Gait parameters for assessing mobility progress of children with bilateral spastic cerebral palsy

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. Cerebral palsy (CP) is one of the most common causes of gait deviation in children. A lot of clinical and research effort is put in order to improve or maintain the walking ability of the affected patients through different clinical interventions. Therefore, a methodology to evaluate the effects of such therapies is crucial. The objective quantification of gait features can be obtained with instrumented gait analysis (IGA). However, the huge amount of data provided by the IGA and the lack of consensus on which are the most clinically important gait parameters make it a challenging clinical tool to use. OBJECTIVE. The aim of this work is to target the most significant gait parameters, proof their utility with gait data of children diagnosed with CP and propose a datasheet to synthetize the obtained results and make them easy-understandable. RESULTS. Through an exhaustive research, spatiotemporal parameters (gait speed, cadence, stride length and single and double support times) and kinematic parameters (maximum, minimum and range of motion) have been found to be the most significant parameters for the gait assessment of children with cerebral palsy. Different severity levels of crouch gait data from children diagnosed with CP have been analysed and the computed gait parameters have been proved to be useful for differentiating different stages of a same pathology and separating it from normative gait data. With this information, a datasheet with the most relevant gait results has been presented. CONCLUSION. Despite the current disadvantages of the instrumented gait analysis, this work has meant to be an initial approach to introduce IGA in the daily clinical assessment of children diagnosed with bilateral spastic CP.