Validation of motion analysis protocols: A fundamental issue for clinical application and modeling

Abstract

Motion analysis has been widely adopted for the quantification of the functional alteration/limitation associated to different pathologies and treatments since le late 70's. Recently much debate was arouse to verify whether this method is clinically affective, and significantly supports the clinical decision process, improving the final outcome on the patient. With this respect, several consensus conferences are being developed by national and international clinical motion analysis societies to assess evidences evaluating the clinical effectiveness of quantitative motion analysis. A criticality in the assessment of this evidence is the possibility to validate the performance of these protocols. The present papers presents three representative approaches for the possible quantification of motion analysis protocols performance. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.