Knee osteoarthritis is a progressive disease characterized by the degeneration of articular
cartilage of the knee joint. To understand the causes and effects of pathological gait symptoms
and to optimize intervention management refined methods for the quantitative assessment of
gait and its impairment are necessary. However objective functional gait measures are commonly
not assessed in clinical practice. This thesis presents the application of state-of-the-art
methods of human gait analysis using infrared cinematography to investigate the fundamentals of
gait and the effect of non-invasive interventions in osteoarthritis. Although cinematography is
considered the gold standard in movement analysis its use for gait assessment in clinical
routine is limited due to high costs and operational efforts. Therefore a mobile sensorbased
system was validated and then applied to a population of osteoarthritis patients undergoing
total knee arthroplasty. The system achieved high discriminative ability and a highly accurate
prediction of whether patients' gait improved or aggravated after surgery was possible based on
pre-operative gait parameters. The findings are beneficial for the domain of intervention
research and for the integration of objective and ambulatory gait analysis into clinical
practice.
