Hi, I’ve had a bit of a break over the summer but I’m hoping to start posting again regularly form now on. Just a reminder that we are running another gait course in November (this one focussing on measurement issues rather than clinical interpretation). Click on the image to the right for more details. There is also just about time to register to start our Masters in Clinical Gait Analysis by distance learning (you don’t need to come to Salford at all). Click on the other image to the right for more details of it.

Enough of the ads, this blog following on from one I wrote just after the GCMAS meeting last year. It had a video link to the presentation I’d just delivered arguing that the reason we collect normative data should be so that we can compare it with other people’s normative data. I presented data showing that if we did that for the normative data from the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and Gillette Children’s Speciality Healthcare then we get quite remarkable agreement. You can see the comparative kinematic data in the figure below.

The paper based on that presentation has finally got published in Gait and Posture (if you don’t have access to the journal you can find a pre-publication version here). We’ve also prepared an Excel file that contains the data in a format that allows you to add your own normative data (mean and standard deviation) to allow comparison with the data from Melbourne and Gillette. Just cut and paste your data into the spreadsheet and look at the graphs to see how you compare. Remember that differences in the mean traces suggest that there are systematic differences in how you apply markers, differences in standard deviations are likely to reflect how consistently you apply them within your own lab.

Do let me know how well your data compares. It might be interesting to post some examples of how various clinical centres compare on this blog-site somewhere.