COP • Plantar Pressure • PTI • Ground Contact Area
Use on walkpad.app/blog and for media outreach. All posts include peer-reviewed sources with URLs.
COP traces how the load travels under your foot during stance. Its path and velocity reflect balance control, dynamic stability, orthotics effectiveness, and gait efficiency—signals that step counts can't reveal. Without reliable COP, gait analysis is mostly guesswork.
Plantar pressure quantifies where and how much load your foot bears. It's essential for diagnosing foot problems, designing footwear/orthoses, guiding rehab, and preventing running-related injuries. No serious gait analysis ignores pressure maps.
Peak pressure is just a snapshot. PTI integrates magnitude × time, capturing cumulative tissue load—crucial for understanding injury risk (e.g., tissue breakdown, ulceration) and for guiding progressive loading in rehab/performance.
Contact area and contact time tell you how load spreads across the foot. Combined with pressure and COP, area metrics help detect offloading success, asymmetries, and risky patterns (e.g., prolonged forefoot contact).