Timing of foot contact events provides important information for gait studi
es. The aim of the study is to validate the use of kinematic data, collecte
d at 50 Hz to define foot contact events during gait initiation. Simultaneo
us kinetic and kinematic data recordings of four discrete foot contact even
ts were made for normal adults. Raters were asked to estimate the timing of
the events from kinematic data curves and these timings were compared with
those derived from the kinetic data. For the four events, between 88 and 9
8%, of all ratings were accurate to within 0.03 s. Inter-rater reliability
was extremely high, reflecting the precision of the definitions used. (C) 2
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