Kinematics and Ground Reaction Force Determination: A Demonstration Quantifying Locomotor Abilities of Young Adult, Middle-aged, and Geriatric Rats

Behavior, in its broadest definition, can be defined as the motor manifestation of physiologic processes. As such, all behaviors manifest through the motor system. In the fields of neuroscience and orthopedics, locomotion is a commonly evaluated behavior for a variety of disease models. For example, locomotor recovery after traumatic injury to the nervous system is one of the most commonly evaluated behaviors (1-3). Though locomotion can be evaluated using a variety of endpoint measurements (e.g. time taken to complete a locomotor task, etc), semiquantitative kinematic measures (e.g. ordinal rating scales (e.g. Basso Beattie and Bresnahan locomotor (BBB) rating scale, etc)) and surrogate measures of behaviour (e.g. muscle force, nerve conduction velocity, etc), only kinetics (force measurements) and kinematics (measurements of body segments in space) provide a detailed description of the strategy by which an animal is able to locomote (1). Though not new, kinematic and kinetic measurements of locomoting rodents is now more readily accessible due to the availability of commercially available equipment designed for this purpose. Importantly, however, experimenters need to be very familiar with theory of biomechanical analyses and understand the benefits and limitations of these forms of analyses prior to embarking on what will become a relatively labor-intensive study. The present paper aims to describe a method for collecting kinematic and ground reaction force data using commercially available equipment. Details of equipment and apparatus set-up, pre-training of animals, inclusion and exclusion criteria of acceptable runs, and methods for collecting the data are described. We illustrate the utility of this behavioral analysis technique by describing the kinematics and kinetics of strain-matched young adult, middle-aged, and geriatric rats.