Factors affecting walking speed in normal human gait. Abstract Introduction: Gait is the manner in which walking is performed. Walking is one of the most practised of all motor skills and major goal in rehabilitation. Walking is a complex and coordinated activity. Gait analysis provides useful information to distinguish between normal and abnormal gait pattern. Gait speed is one of the simple method for quantifying gait abnormality which influences the gait pattern. Clinical relevance: Gait is widely accepted as a measure of functional capability of an individual, quality of life, risk of falling early, mortality and outcomes of rehabilitation. In addition, it is an independent measure to analyse the gait dynamics in healthy individual and patients. A reliable and valid measure that predicts community ambulation. Key observation: There are several measurements to analyse gait like kinetics or kinematics. However, gait speed is one of the basic and frequent parameters to evaluate gait patterns. The accurate assessment of gait reference data has great deal of variability among the data reported. It may be due to different methodology used and subjects anthropometric data which increases inter-subject gait value variation. Conclusion: Gait speed is a simplified gait analysis method which can be used for describing gait abnormalities and for evaluating the changes in gait. A variability of gait speed greatly depends on gender, limb length and walkway length. Separate reference data are needed depending upon the gender, limb length data and walkway length. Therefore, criteria used to select the subjects and methods are important and can affect gait performance. Therefore, such factors have relevance to the interpretation of gait speed measurement and treatment intervention. Reference: 1 | Page