Objective gait analysis can provide clinicians with important information for treatment decisions. It can be used not only for diagnostic purposes but also to provide important information for breeding. Current gait analysis systems used in veterinary medicine to collect kinematic and kinetic data are expensive and require specialized space.

Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) systems offer new ideas for canine gait analysis.IMU sensors can be an alternative to optical kinematics gait analysis and can also collect data outside the laboratory. A Swiss study shows that simple algorithms can also extract relevant gait features such as range of motion, stance phase and swing phase from inertial measurements. The results are comparable to other more sophisticated methods.