CGM2 is gaining ground with Australia’s Biomechanics community. 

Monash Health Kingston Centre in Australia has one of Australia’s longest-standing gait labs, specializing in adults with neurological conditions including stroke, MS, and cerebral palsy. Corey Joseph, one of the leading biomechanists at the laboratory, is part of a community of researchers working to validate the Conventional Gait Model 2 (CGM2) with the hope of introducing it into clinical settings in the near future.

“Curiosity is really what got me wanting to experiment with CGM2,” says Joseph. He was very familiar with Plug-in Gait but, as he puts it, “You can’t look in to see how things are done in Plug-in Gait. It’s a black box, and there are very well-known limitations to it.”

When he learned about the work being done by Dr. Fabien Leboeuf on CGM2, he was intrigued. “I was interested in it being open access,” he says. “You could download the kit and work with it yourself. I wanted to experiment with it for a few reasons. One was because I was interested to see the improvements that had been made from Plug-in Gait. And, in particular, things like removing Knee Alignment Devices (KAD), so you can just use two medial and lateral markers in the knee like you do on the ankle. And some additional things that you could do with a foot—just really simplifying it into two structures instead of one.

“The other thing that interested me was the ability to use clusters, rather than using tibia and thigh markers—that’s really problematic because patients knock them a lot and then we have to spend time fixing that.”