The level of skills involved in an observation-based gait analysis

Abstract

This study aimed to determine the visual assessment skills during an observation-based gait analysis. Participants (N=40) included 20 physiotherapists (PTs) with>10 years of clinical experience (physiotherapists) and 20 physiotherapy students.　Both groups watched a video of the gait of a subject with Guillain–Barré syndrome before and after being provided with information regarding other movements. Further, visual lines were measured using an EMR-8 eye mark recorder, and the results were compared between both groups. The average gaze duration was longer for students than for PTs (F1,79=53.3; p<0.01), whereas PTs gazed more often than the students (F1,79=87.6; p< 0.01). Furthermore, the PTs moved their eyes vertically more often than the students (F1,151=9.1; P< 0.01). We found that being able to discriminate the relative physical relationship of body locations by frequent and rapid vertical gazes could be an indication of the level of skills as an index to express the visual assessment skill in an observation-based gait analysis.