Gait Recognition

Gait recognition.
Back in university, in my first year, there was a fella on our dorm floor who was basically blind. He could see shapes, light, darkness, figures moving but he could not truly recognize faces until he was about 6 inches from your face. What was amazing though was how quickly he tuned into voice recognition and how we all walked. He could label you from across the room by how you walked it seemed. He had developed a fine tuned sense of movement. I learned something from him by talking to him about this and i use it in my clinic every day when i watch people's gait. Aside from the visual, even the sound of one's foot fall is taken into consideration, there is information there. This is a skill, it comes easily to though who have one of their primary senses, usually visual, blunted. It is about not getting caught up in the details, it is about the quality of the movement of a person that i first glean, then i go back and dissect the details. But, when it comes to the clinical dissection of gait, one has to know all of the time stamp normal gait parameters, the phases, the acts that should occur at each phase, and what should not. If one is a self-labelled gait expert and one cannot spout off the normal phases and what should happen at each phase, and what should not, one should consider down grading their guru label.

"Our brains are especially tuned to see the movements that we and our fellow humans perform and there are particular circuits concerned with perceiving somebody else’s walk, known in the trade as ‘gait’. Studies have shown it is possible to recognise an individual from their walking pattern from any angle. So powerful is the mechanism that even when the walking body is reduced to points of light, carefully placed at the joints of the body, it can still trigger identification, so it may not be the shape or indeed the dress that is the most distinctive feature when it comes to recognising the walker. And we can also reliably infer a person’s emotion from how they walk. "

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/28/walk-this-way-how-the-brain-recognises-someone-by-their-gait-pippa-middleton