Kinematic Similarity of Overground and Self-paced Omnidirectional Treadmill Walking in Healthy and Parkinsonian Subjects

The use of self-paced omnidirectional treadmills equipped with body weight support and virtual reality environments in the clinical practice may allow the training of walking in safe and repeatable conditions across different pathologies. One premise for this to be true is that the conditions of overground and treadmill walking may be similar, so that the latter can be used as an early training to develop the former. Here, we study the equivalence in the spatio-temporal parameters of gait between walking overground and on the Moonwalker, an omnidirectional treadmill equipped with body weight support and virtual reality. Additionally, we show that such gait parameters could be used to distinguish between healthy and parkinsonian patients with similar accuracies for the overground and treadmill condition. Overall, this work contributes to justify the introduction of self-paced omnidirectional treadmill in the clinical and rehabilitative practice.