Exploring the development requirements for virtual reality gait analysis

The hip joint is highly prone to traumatic and degenerative pathologies resulting in irregular locomotion. Monitoring and treatment depend on high-end technology facilities requiring physician and patient co-location, thus limiting access to specialist monitoring and treatment for populations living in rural and remote locations. Telemedicine offers an alternative means of monitoring, negating the need for patient physical presence. In addition, emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and immersive technologies, offer potential future solutions through virtual presence, where the patient and health professional can meet in a virtual environment (a virtual clinic). To this end, a prototype asynchronous telemedicine VR gait analysis system was designed, aiming to transfer a full clinical facility within the patients’ local proximity. The proposed system employs cost-effective alternative motion capture combined with the system’s immersive 3D virtual gait analysis clinic. The user interface and the tools in the application offer health professionals asynchronous, objective, and subjective analyses. This paper investigates the requirements for the design of such a system and discusses preliminary comparative data of its performance evaluation against a high-fidelity gait analysis clinical application.