Gait Lab – DPT
Classes are starting to come together this summer in my first year in the DPT program at St. Scholastica. We’ve been studying the musculature, blood supply, nerve innervaton, and biomechanics of the human body. We’re now beginning to put it all together into more applicable situations (i.e. gait/manner of walking).
In the photo below our professor, Dr. Jon Nelson is teaching us about the eccentric contractions of the hamstring muscles. What is up on the projector (skeleton and graphs) are from a previous motor behavior lab to assess a student’s gait.
In the next couple weeks students will be going into the motor behavior lab in groups of three to be subjects for a similar video. We will have to place markers on specific boney processes to formulate our own personal skeleton and use EMG electrodes to analyze muscle activity. The motor behavior lab has over a dozen camera’s that take into account all of our markers to formulate a 3D image (similar to the one in the photo). The EMG electrodes have software that analyze and graph the information as seen on the right of the photo.
Very interesting and valuable classes/labs coming up!

Dr. Jon Nelson teaching us about gait (walking) in our Functional Anatomy class.
Tags: biomechanics, DPT, functional anatomy, gait, lab, physical therapy, Student, Summer