Alterations in sagittal-plane knee joint kinematics and kinetics during gait in knee osteoarthritis patients with complaints of instability

Deep learning models developed to predict knee joint kinematics are usually trained on inertial measurement unit (IMU) data from healthy people and only for the activity of walking. Yet, people with knee osteoarthritis have difficulties with other activities and there are a lack of studies using IMU training data from this population. Our objective was to conduct a proof-of-concept study to determine the feasibility of using IMU training data from people with knee osteoarthritis performing multiple clinically important activities to predict knee joint sagittal plane kinematics using a deep learning approach. We trained a bidirectional long short-term memory model on IMU data from 17 participants with knee osteoarthritis to estimate knee joint flexion kinematics for phases of walking, transitioning to and from a chair, and negotiating stairs. We tested two models, a double-leg model (four IMUs) and a single-leg model (two IMUs). The single-leg model demonstrated less prediction error compared to the double-leg model. Across the different activity phases, RMSE (SD) ranged from 7.04° (2.6) to 11.78° (6.04), MAE (SD) from 5.99° (2.34) to 10.37° (5.44), and Pearson’s R from 0.85 to 0.99 using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using IMU training data from people who have knee osteoarthritis for the prediction of kinematics for multiple clinically relevant activities.

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DIFFERENCES IN KNEE JOINT KINEMATICS AND KINETICS DURING LEVEL WALKING AND WALKING WITH TWO TYPES OF POLES — FOCUS ON KNEE VARUS MOMENT

Journal of Musculoskeletal Research ◽

10.1142/s0218957713500188 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 16 (04) ◽

pp. 1350018

Author(s):

Susumu Ota ◽

Ai Nakanishi ◽

Hirotaka Sato ◽

Seiji Akita ◽

Kazunori Hase ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Knee Joint ◽

Effect Size ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Knee Kinematics ◽

Joint Kinematics ◽

Level Walking ◽

Front Condition ◽

Knee Joint Kinematics ◽

Gait Modification ◽

Kinematics And Kinetics

Walking with poles is one of the gait modification strategies for reducing external knee varus moments in people with medial knee osteoarthritis (OA). However, there are two types of pole techniques, Nordic walking (NW: pole back condition) and pole walking (PW: pole front condition). The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in knee joint kinematics, and kinetics during level walking, and two types of walking with poles. A total of 22 subjects with a mean age of 21.2 years (SD: 1.3 years) participated. Three-dimensional gait analysis was conducted on level walking (LW), NW and PW. The first and second peaks of the knee kinematic and kinetic data and ground reaction forces were used. No significant differences were found between NW and PW in the knee kinematics and kinetics data. The second peak of the knee varus moment in NW and PW (0.34 and 0.33 Nm/kg, respectively) was significantly decreased compared to LW (0.42 Nm/kg, p < 0.01; Effect size = 0.70, p < 0.01; Effect size = 0.82). The first peak of the flexion moment in the knee during NW (1.2 Nm/kg) was significantly higher compared to LW (1.2 Nm/kg, p < 0.01; Effect size = 0.98). However, the present study could not clarify any different effect on the knee joint due to different instructions of the back pole and forward pole technique.

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