Gait analysis in the assessment of patients undergoing a total hip replacement

Nowadays, healthcare centers are not familiar with quantitative approaches for patients’ gait evaluation. There is a clear need for methods to obtain objective figures characterizing patients’ performance. Actually, there are no diffused methods for comparing the pre- and post-operative conditions of the same patient, integrating clinical information and representing a measure of the efficiency of functional recovery, especially in the short-term distance of the surgical intervention. To this aim, human motion tracking for medical analysis is creating new frontiers for potential clinical and home applications. Motion Capture (Mocap) systems are used to allow detecting and tracking human body movements, such as gait or any other gesture or posture in a specific context. In particular, low-cost portable systems can be adopted for the tracking of patients’ movements. The pipeline going from tracking the scene to the creation of performance scores and indicators has its main challenge in the data elaboration, which depends on the specific context and to the detailed performance to be evaluated. The main objective of this research is to investigate whether the evaluation of the patient's gait through markerless optical motion capture technology can be added to clinical evaluations scores and if it is able to provide a quantitative measure of recovery in the short postoperative period. A system has been conceived, including commercial sensors and a way to elaborate data captured according to caregivers’ requirements. This allows transforming the real gait of a patient right before and/or after the surgical procedure into a set of scores of medical relevance for his/her evaluation. The technical solution developed in this research will be the base for a large acquisition and data elaboration campaign performed in collaboration with an orthopedic team of surgeons specialized in hip arthroplasty. This will also allow assessing and comparing the short run results obtained by adopting different state-of-the-art surgical approach for the hip replacement.