The Gaitmat II is capable of real-time quantitative analysis of gait. It consists of an instrumented walkway and an IBM compatible computer running the Gaitmat II software. The walkway is 12 feet long, 40 inches wide and 1 inch high. The surface of the walkway contains 9728 switches arranged in 38 rows, with each row containing 256 switches. The switches are normally open.
When a subject traverses the mat, the switches transiently close and then reopen as the subjects feet contact and break contact with the mat. The states of all switches are constantly monitored by the computer. When a switch closes and then reopens, the computer records the closing and opening times. In this manner, both the temporal and spatial characteristics (stride length, double support time, step length, step time, average velocity, etc) of the patient's gait are obtained.