Stance Analyzer

[lehughes]

I had a demonstration of the PetSafe stance Analyer today and wondered if you had experience of this and do you consider it a useful tool?
Thanks

G.B.

[lehughes]

Hey!
Okay... so I have one. We use it for post op objective measurements, and we used it for our sporting dog baseline assessments. The latter was very interesting b/c what it showed us that we gain WAY more information and the only USEFUL information from our manual assessment. It's can be useful as an "Objective Measurement tool'. It can be used therefore to prove yourself to referring vets. And owners like it. And if you have $$ to spare - go ahead.
Laurie

[lehughes]

Thanks Laurie. I could tell the vet who came to watch was impressed and she reported back to her colleagues. We used 2 dogs belonging to another vet both with problems and the results didn't tally with what we knew. I couldn't decide if that was due to poor positioning on the mat or poor interpretation by the demonstrator.

G.

[lehughes]

There is a good deal of finesse required with it's use and placement. You can't have it too close to one wall. You need to be careful where you the tester is standing and/or that the owner is squarely infront and not causing the dog to stand off to one side (i.e. Mum has a cookie in her RIGHT hand/ pocket). We found that if it's in a room with a door, you want the dog facing the door. So many things can give mis-reading!

Laurie

[lehughes]

Thanks. The demonstrator did explain about walls and door but I didn't feel she paid enough attention to how close the paw was to the joins of the plates and also she seemed to rake the readings very quickly and then discard lots without explanation. She is away for 2 weeks now so can't ask her. I used to work in paediatrics where we did a lot of gait analysis on force plates and know how many attempts it can take to get accurate positioning

G.

[lehughes]

We take out the 'outliers' on our data as well. It is nice that you can capture a number of attempts and take out the obvious 'duds' without having to leave them in and affect the final percentages.