Currently I’m doing a feasibility study on using pressure measurements with dogs. The purpose of this study is twofold:

• to find out whether the pressure measuring system is suitable for analyzing a dog’s gait,
• if so, for what dogs is it suitable?

Previous studies on this topic, either using force plates or pressure measuring devices, focused on very basic variables, such as total pressure under each paw, symmetry between the four paws or temporal/spatial information.

However, from my experience with measuring humans, there’s a lot of information to be gathered from the pressure distribution underneath each contact during the entire stance phase. Therefore I shall not only focus on getting it working for dogs, but also trying to make the analysis as good as possible!