One of the most commonly used human movements that plays an essential part of many daily activities and competitive or group sports is gait. Gait initiation is the first step after changing from static to dynamic status of walking and gait termination is the last step before changing from dynamic to static status. By accepting the effect of the properties of floor coverings, people's age, diseases, and musculoskeletal disorders on biomechanical parameters of human's movement, it seems that not only the pattern of muscular activity and the biomechanical parameters of gait initiation and gait termination are different from the routine gait, but these variables are influenced by individual's conditions and various surfaces on which people move on, too. On the other hand, people's imbalance and fall often occur at gait initiation or gait termination. Identifying kinematic and kinetic parameters of gait initiation and gait termination provides useful information to recognize the disturbances of this phase of gait, its pathology, and performance correction. The aim of the present study is reviewing studies carried out since the end of the twentieth century on biomechanical variables of gait initiation and gait termination in different groups and different conditions.
Searching articles was done from databases including PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Mendely, using “gait initiation, gait termination, kinematics, and kinetics” keywords. More than 300 articles on the pattern of muscle activity and biomechanical parameters of gait initiation and gait termination were found. After studying and deleting articles with similar results and articles on therapeutic protocols from the total number of articles, more than 40 articles that were directly related to the subject matter were studied.
From among the papers located, several studies were about planned and unplanned gait initiation or gait termination, gait initiation or gait termination on different floor coverings, in various age groups or people with musculoskeletal disorders.
According to the articles studied, it can be stated that different motor strategies are used at gait initiation at low and high velocities and the young and old groups always uses different muscle activity patterns in different phases of gait initiation. It seems that athletes and active people benefit from better muscle strength and shorter reaction times to prevent collapse and injury making use of compensatory mechanisms.

One of the most common complaints of gait disorders in children is intoeing gait. The aim of this study was to investigate the immediate effect of gait plate insole on gait angle of intoed children. Angle of gait was measured in 17 children aged 4 to 10 years with intoeing gait in 3 modalities: barefoot, ordinary shoes and gait plate insole with ordinary shoes for 3 times consecutively with Rs scan pressure platform. Gait plate insole with ordinary shoes as well as ordinary shoes alone caused a significant increase (p<0.05) in angle of gait in intoed children. As gait plate insole with ordinary shoes and ordinary shoes increase angle of gait 11.16 and 3.85 degrees respectively versus barefoot. Use of gait plate insole in association with ordinary shoes can improve gait appearance in children with intoeing gait.

 In this paper, we apply a filtering scheme to encode motional information from style of human walking into single template. This filtering process utilizes bio-inspired basis kernels which are constructed from two separable spatial and temporal basis functions. To extract opponent motions from gait in a walking cycle, wefusethese kernels together to have spatiotemporal kernels and thenconvolve itwith gait stancesThis paradigm has been repeatedineach frame of gait in a cycle and motional information is highlighted as salient regions inthe sequence of images. To make gait features (salient regions)distinctive enough within different individuals, the responses of gait filtering are aggregated together to get final Gait Salient Image (GSI). Our proposed model provides more representative gait feature since conventional gait templates such as Gait Energy Image (GEI) does not rely on any motion model. Extensive experiments on popular gait databases reveal that, our GSI-based features provides more competitive performance compared with recent published gait recognition approaches with efficiency and accuracy

Gait contains important information about the status of the human body and physiological signs. In many medical applications, it is important to monitor and accurately analyze the gait of the patient. Since walking shows the reproducibility signs in several phases, separating these phases can be used for the gait analysis. In this study, a method based on image processing for extracting phases of human gait from RGB-Depth images is presented. The sequence of depth images from the front view has been processed to extract the lower body depth profile and distance features. Feature vector extracted from image is the same as observation vector of hidden Markov model, and the phases of gait are considered as hidden states of the model. After training the model using the images which are randomly selected as training samples, the phase estimation of gait becomes possible using the model. The results confirm the rate of 60–40% of two major phases of the gait and also the mid-stance phase is recognized with 85% precision.

Gait impairment is common in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Despite many available studies on improvement of gait pattern in patients with multiple sclerosis, rehabilitation treatment protocols are still controversial in the literature.The aim of this study was to evaluate gait pattern characteristics in MS patients with specific clinical symptoms and offer suitable treatment protocols considering previous studies. An electronic search was performed in PubMed, Embase, Google scholar and ISI Web of Sciences from 1990 to 2014 using some keywords include physical therapy, multiple sclerosis, walking pattern, gait and rehabilitation. Selected articles were divided into two categories namely, gait characteristics and patterns (n=27) and affective treatment protocols on gait (n=33). Then, modified downs and black tool was used for quality assessment.Among 27 papers in the first category, the score of 25 papers were lower than 19 and the score of 2 papers were equal to 19. From 33 papers in second category, the score of 21 papers were lower than 19 and the score of 12 papers were equal and higher than 19. Articles with the score of equal and higher than 19 have high methodological quality. Spastic and cerebellar ataxia gait pattern have been seen in patients with multiple sclerosis. Considering the clinical symptoms and the gait patterns in a properly designed rehabilitation program is needed. The reported results of this studysuggest the application ofStretch-based relaxationtrainingin rehabilitation program of spastic gait pattern among MS patients. Moreover, balance and strength training may necessary in training program of MS people with cerebellar ataxia gait pattern.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a demyelinating inflammatory disease of the central nervous system that affects the gait ability, participation and quality of life of individuals. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of rhythmic visual stimulation on kinematics parameters of gait in patients with MS. 18 patients with MS (5 males and 13 females) with Expanded Disability Status Scale scores of 3 to 6 were selected by accessible and purposive sampling method. Patients were randomly assigned to two experimental and control groups. Training for the experimental group included gait with rhythmic visual stimulation and for the control group included gait without stimulation. Training was performed for three weeks, three times a week and each session 30 minutes. Before and after training, stride length, stride time, double support time, cadence and gait speed were measured by motion analysis device. data were analyzed using covariance analysis model and boot strap non parametric method in covariance analysis model. Findings showed gait training with rhythmic visual stimulation leads to improvments: 36% in stride length, 22% in stride time, 41% in double support time, 29% in cadence and 80% in gait speed in patients with MS, but there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in improvement of stride length, stride time, double support time, cadence and gait speed (P>0.05). Therefore, gait training with rhythmic visual stimulation supposed as a complementary rehabilitation method to improve gait function in patients with MS.

Using two consecutive gait cycles, simultaneous and bilateral kinetic gait data, the main objectives of this study were a) to identify the main functional roles of ankle, knee and hip extensors/flexors, and b) to determine whether the action taken by these muscle groups appears to be symmetric or not. Gait of our able-bodied subjects appears to be asymmetric with significant differences noted between each two corresponding peak muscle moment values. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as a curve structure detection method, task discrepancies were recognized when comparisons were made between each two corresponding representative moment curves at each joint (local asymmetry). Muscle moment behaved symmetrically when the right limb representative curve was compared to its corresponding principal component (PC) at the contralateral limb. Gait of able-bodied subjects appears to be symmetric, while control and propulsion were recognized as two major roles of the extensors and flexors (global gait asymmetry). Symmetrical behavior of the lower limbs should be considered a consequence of local asymmetry which indicates different levels of within and between muscle activities developed at each joint during gait cycles.

The aim of the study was to assess the effect of an 8-week balance exercise program for enhancement of gait function on temporal and spatial parameters of school aged children with intellectual disabilities.
Forty young people with intellectual disabilities were assigned either to the balance exercise program for enhancement of gait function group (BG group, n=19) or the control group (n=21). The BG group attended an 8-week balance exercise program for enhancement of gait function consisting of two sessions a week. Gait was assessed using temporal and spatial parameters.
The balance exercise program resulted in significant improvements in participant performance in temporal and spatial parameters.
A balance exercise program for enhancement of gait function can be an effective intervention for improving functional outcomes and can be recommended as an alternative mode of physical activity programming for improving balance and gait.

In this study we investigated the differences of functional gait and balance measures between patients with chronic stroke with different level of concern about falling.
Fifty-four patients with chronic stroke participated in this observational, cross-sectional study. The level of concern relating to falls was assessed by using the Falls Efficacy Scale-International. Thirty-three patients were classified as slightly concerned about falling, while twenty-one patients were highly concerned. Patients performed functional gait and balance tests including Berg Balance Scale, Timed Up & Go test, 10 Meter Walking Test and Functional Gait Assessment. The difference in outcome measures between the two groups was determined by an independent t-test.
All functional gait and balance tests of patients with high concern about falling were poorer than those for patients with slight concern.
The level of concern relating to falls may influence gait and balance performance in individuals with chronic stroke and should be addressed in traditional gait and balance rehabilitation programs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of viscoelastic ankle foot prosthesis on below-knee amputee gait cycle by using dynamic simulation of human walking. A two dimensional, seven segment model is developed to simulate normal and amputee entire gait cycle equipped with foot-ground contact model in order to simulate entire gait cycle in an integrated way. In the first step, optimization procedure was coupled with forward dynamic to simulate normal gait cycle. Next step was started by replacing ideal torque generator of ankle joint with passive elements that represents passive prosthetic ankle-foot, in order to simulate below-knee amputee gait cycle. The optimal coefficients of joints that were obtained from dynamic simulation of normal gait cycle were then used for amputee model’s intact joints. Three type of optimal passive ankle foot prosthesis were designed using forward dynamic optimization and the simulation results were employed to compare the performance of different prostheses. The results indicated that using viscoelastic ankle foot prosthesis decreases speed-normalized total work, cost function, dynamic effort and increases speed of the amputee model. Hence using viscoelastic ankle foot prosthesis can improve below-knee amputee walking pattern