Short-term step-to-step correlation in plantar pressure distributions during treadmill walking, and implications for footprint trail analysis

•This is the first study to explicitly examine short-term gait-cycle correlations.•Step-to-step autocorrelations in plantar pressure distributions were calculated.•Step-to-step correlations were weak across the whole plantar surface.•Support is provided for regarding neighboring footsteps as independent samples.

The gait cycle is continuous, but for practical reasons one is often forced to analyze one or only a few adjacent cycles, for example in non-treadmill laboratory investigations and in fossilized footprint analysis. The nature of variability in long-term gait cycle dynamics has been well-investigated, but short-term variability, and specifically correlation, which are highly relevant to short gait bouts, have not. We presently tested for step-to-step autocorrelation in a total of 5243 plantar pressure (PP) distributions from ten subjects who walked at 1.1 m/s on an instrumented treadmill. Following spatial foot alignment, data were analyzed both from three points of interest (POI): heel, central metatarsals, and hallux, and for the foot surface as a whole, in a mass-univariate manner. POI results revealed low average step-to-step autocorrelation coefficients (r = 0.327 ± 0.094; mean ± st. dev.). Formal statistical testing of the whole-foot r distributions reached significance over an average of only 0.42 ± 0.52% of the foot's surface, even for a highly conservative uncorrected threshold of p < 0.05. The common assumption, that short gait bouts consist of independent cycles, is therefore not refuted by the present PP results.