With gait analysis, I will sometimes be able to extract huge amounts of information from just videos of a patient moving on a treadmill or even just walking along the road.

In more complex circumstances, I may wish to see how the foot pressures load and at what points in the gait cycle different parts of the feet load. Some examples of this would be for a person who walks a lot and always gets forefoot pain on their right foot. If they are on their right foot for 1000ms and their left foot for 800ms, that means they spend 200ms more time on their right foot, which means there is 200ms more time with the foot impacting the ground... This being said, it may also be that they actually spend 600 ms on their forefoot on the right meaning that 75% of their time on the right foot is spent on the forefoot. This means that the treatment - rather than more cushioning under the forefoot or telling them to walk quicker, may need to be a heel raise so that they spend less time with just their forefoot on the ground and so that the force gets evened up.

Using a foreceplate before and after running gait analysis can also be helpful for objectively identifying changes to foot functioning and musculature.