Agreement between footswitch and ground reaction force techniques for identifying gait events: Inter-session repeatability and the effect of walking speed

Abstract

This study assessed the inter-session repeatability of agreement between foot-ground contact events (foot contact and foot off) identified from ground reaction force and footswitch-based techniques over a range of gait speeds. No inter-session differences in agreement between the ground reaction force and footswitch-based techniques were identified and while agreement between foot-ground contact events defined by the two techniques was found to differ with walking speed, the differences were small (<6 ms or ~1% stance duration) and therefore of little practical significance to the majority of gait studies.