Background

The ability for independent bipedal locomotion is an important prerequisite for autonomous mobility and participation in everyday life. Walking requires not only a functional musculoskeletal unit but relies on coordinated activation of muscles and may even require cognitive resources. The time-resolved monitoring of the position of joints, feet, legs and other body segments relative to each other alone or in combination with simultaneous recording of ground reaction forces and concurrent measurement of electrical muscle activity, using surface electromyography, are well-established tools for the objective assessment of gait.

Research Question

The Gait Real-time Analysis Interactive Lab (GRAIL) has been introduced for gait analysis in a highly standardized and well-controlled virtual environment. However, apart from high computing capacity and sophisticated software required to run the system, handling of GRAIL data is challenging due to the utilization of different software packages resulting in a huge amount of data stored using different file formats and different sampling rates. These issues make gait analysis even with such a sophisticated instrument rather tedious, especially within the frame of an experimental or clinical study.

Methods

A user-friendly Matlab based toolset for automated processing of motion capturing data recorded using the GRAIL, with the inherent option for batch analysis was developed.

Results

The toolset allows the reading, resampling, filtering and synchronization of data stored in different input files recorded with the GRAIL. It includes a coordinate-based algorithm for the detection of initial contact and toe-off events to split and normalize data relative to gait cycles. Batch processing of multiple measurements and automatic detection of outliers is possible.

Significance

The authors hope that the toolset will be useful to the research community and invite everyone to use, modify or implement it in their own work.

中文翻译：

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用于自动处理 GRAIL 提供的运动跟踪数据的基于 MATLAB 的工具

背景

双足独立运动的能力是自主移动和参与日常生活的重要先决条件。步行不仅需要一个功能性的肌肉骨骼单位，还依赖于肌肉的协调激活，甚至可能需要认知资源。单独或结合同时记录地面反作用力和同时测量肌肉电活动，使用表面肌电图对关节、脚、腿和其他身体部位相对于彼此的位置进行时间分辨监测，是成熟的工具用于步态的客观评估。

研究问题

步态实时分析交互式实验室 (GRAIL) 已被引入，用于在高度标准化和控制良好的虚拟环境中进行步态分析。然而，除了运行系统所需的高计算能力和复杂的软件之外，由于使用不同的软件包导致使用不同的文件格式和不同的采样率存储大量数据，因此处理 GRAIL 数据具有挑战性。这些问题使步态分析即使使用如此复杂的仪器也相当乏味，尤其是在实验或临床研究的框架内。

方法

开发了一个用户友好的基于 Matlab 的工具集，用于自动处理使用 GRAIL 记录的运动捕捉数据，并具有批处理分析的固有选项。

结果

该工具集允许读取、重采样、过滤和同步存储在使用 GRAIL 记录的不同输入文件中的数据。它包括一个基于坐标的算法，用于检测初始接触和脚趾离地事件，以分割和标准化与步态周期相关的数据。多个测量的批处理和异常值的自动检测是可能的。

意义

作者希望该工具集对研究社区有用，并邀请每个人在自己的工作中使用、修改或实施它。