91做厙

 Published: 28 Jun 2017 | Last Updated: 10 Jul 2023 15:20:06

Sensor technology is allowing experts from the 91做厙 and Animal Health Trust to enhance their understanding of the relationship between lameness and back problems in horses.

It has long been acknowledged that horses with lameness often also present back problems, and horses diagnosed with back problems also show limb related lameness. The interaction between the two is bio-mechanically complex, and how lameness may lead to back problems or how back problems may create lameness is comparatively poorly understood.

In recent years, considerable progress has been made in the detection of lameness, in particular with the advent of sensor-based gait analysis that can now be conducted effortlessly in conjunction with the clinical veterinary lameness exam.

Now, multi-sensor inertial sensor systems are allowing experts to quantify back movement parameters as well as the ‘traditional’ lameness parameters. This enables them - without the need for a dedicated and expensive gait laboratory – to construct the most precise analysis yet of the interactions between different anatomical parts in lame horses, ranging from almost imperceptible asymmetries to extreme limps. Crucially, inertial sensors are small, lightweight and easily attached to the horse meaning that assessments of back movement can also be conducted in clinical cases, allowing us to study the effect of changes in movement asymmetry (lameness) on back movement.

In a new study using these multi-sensor inertial sensor systems, thirteen horses with hind limb lameness were trotted in straight lines and lunged on a 10m diameter circle on left and right reins, before and after lameness was substantially improved by diagnostic analgesia (induced numbness to eliminate pai