Primary Exploration on the Symmetry of Human Walking

Normal walking has often been assumed to be symmetric. A few papers have discussed the kinematic symmetry in healthy adults using statistical and mathematic calculations, but no consensus exists on the methodology. In this paper, we try to define what walking symmetry is and determine mathematical symmetry indices. We have investigated walking symmetry among healthy subjects from 20 to 69 years old by using Fourteen-Linkage (FL) model. In the case of bilateral dynamic gait data, we make use of a dynamic time warping algorithm to calculate the similarity between them. The result shows this method has a good application on describing walking symmetry. The paper analyzes three kinds of symmetry, but here mainly mentions dynamic symmetry.