Individual step and participant mean validation of Gaitly's smartphone video-based gait analysis system

Despite technological advancements, a clinically appropriate gait assessment tool has yet to be developed. A clinical gait assessment tool needs to be affordable, portable, easy to use and able to provide accurate, reliable gait metrics. As an initial step to address this need, this study sought to validate the accuracy and reliability of step/stride level and participant-mean level gait metrics from Gaitly, a novel mobile smartphone video-based gait analysis application, against the GAITRite pressure-sensitive walkway system in healthy adults. With the exception of swing time, the temporal measures yielded absolute error ≤5% and ICC ≥ 0.88 for both the step/stride and the participant mean level comparisons. For participant mean level comparisons for spatial measurements the absolute error < 2% and ICC ≥ 0.9. Thus, the Gaitly application offers a innovative, cost-effective gait analysis system that could be used in rural and urban settings.