Derivation of the Gait Deviation Index for Spinal Cord Injury

The Gait Deviation Index (GDI) is a way to measure how much someone's walking pattern differs from a normal walking pattern. This study creates a new GDI specifically for adults with spinal cord injuries (SCI). The researchers compared this new SCI-GDI with the original GDI (developed for children with cerebral palsy) and a walking scale (WISCI II) to see if it's a better tool for assessing walking in people with SCI. The results suggest that the original GDI may overestimate walking ability in people with SCI, and the new SCI-GDI is more sensitive to detecting differences in walking impairment.

• 1
  A 21-feature basis is necessary to account for most of the variance in gait patterns in the SCI population and to provide high-quality reconstructions of the gait curves.
• 2
  The SCI-GDI discriminates most levels of the WISCI II scale, except for levels 12 and 18.
• 3
  The implementation of the original GDI in SCI may lead to overestimation of gait function, and our new SCI-GDI is more sensitive to larger gait impairment than the GDI.