Electromyography as an Important Parameter for a Proper Assessment of Dynamic Muscles Strength in Gait Analysis

Abstract

Normal gait is a functional movement involving the most efficient energy transfer. Cerebral Palsy describes a group of developmental disorders of movement and posture causing activity restriction or disability. It represents one of the most common cause of physical disability in children. Gait analysis provides great contributions to the understanding of gait disorders originating from musculoskeletal abnormalities. In these patients provides a mean for a more comprehensive treatment plan. At this point, the potential and necessity of using correct biomechanical models that consistently study the abnormalities become clear. Reinforcing and correcting a simple gait analysis and eliminating the unknowns when selecting the appropriate treatment are crucial in clinical settings. In this paper a musculoskeletal thigh model with a simple rescaling method using subject-specific anthropometric data is presented. The thigh model estimates muscle forces of the six muscles through the walking based in static optimization without including electromyography data as input. We used the model proposed for identify the muscles strength involved in normal and pathological gait. The forces obtaining for normal subjects achieved high concordance with their electromyography data and outcomes to other musculoskeletal model recently presented. In other hand, in patients with cerebral palsy with crouch gait the outcomes of our musculoskeletal model don't show a correct concordance with their electromyography data. For this reason we get on the conclusion that take electromyography data became important in modeling a pathological gait as crouch gait.