The effect of axillary crutch length on upper limb kinematics during swing‐through gait
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Axillary crutches are commonly used in rehabilitation. Inappropriately fit crutches may result in upper limb pain or injury. Objective To investigate the effects of axillary crutch length on upper limb kinematics to better understand potential injury mechanisms. It was hypothesized that crutches that were longer or shorter than standard‐fit crutches would alter upper limb kinematics. Design Cross‐sectional. Setting Gait laboratory. Participants Fifteen healthy males with no prior crutch experience. Interventions Participants were fit with axillary crutches using standardized methods, as well as with crutches that were 5 cm longer and 5 cm shorter. Participants performed swing‐through gait (1.20 ± 0.07 ms −1 ) with all crutch lengths in randomized order. Kinematics were recorded using an optical motion‐tracking system and joint angles for the scapula, shoulder, elbow, and wrist were computed. Main Outcome Measures The effects of crutch length on joint range of motion (ROM) and joint angles at initial crutch contact were analyzed using multivariate analysis (Hotelling's T 2 ; α = .025) and simultaneous confidence intervals (CI). Results The long‐standard crutch fit comparison showed effects across all joints (ROM p = .009; initial contact p < .001). Longer crutches resulted in greater scapular upward rotation (mean difference [95% CI] ROM: 1.0 [−0.2 to 2.2]; initial contact: −2.7 [−4.4, −1.1]) and shoulder abduction (ROM: 0.8 [−0.1 to 1.8]; initial contact: −1.9 [−4.1 to 0.3]). Crutch length also had effects across all joints for the short‐standard fit comparison (ROM p = .004; initial contact p = .016). Shorter crutches resulted in greater scapula downward rotation (2.2 [−0.4 to 4.8]) and greater shoulder adduction (2.5 [−0.6 to 5.6]) at initial contact. Shorter crutches also reduced shoulder flexion/extension ROM (−2.5 [−4.4 to −0.6]). Conclusions Altered crutch length results in scapular and shoulder kinematic deviations that may present risk factors for upper limb injury with crutch‐walking. This may underline the importance of appropriate device fitting to reduce injury risk in crutch users.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".