What it measures
Figures that mean something on their own
Nothing here is an index or a composite score invented to look tidy. Each figure is a thing you could in principle measure with a tape and a stopwatch, if you had a hundred hands and a very patient horse. Taken the same way each season, they are a record of your horse to set against your horse.
The horse’s own units, not ours
Every figure comes off the landmark paths, and every one carries the confidence the tracking earned rather than a flat number with no provenance. Measured the same way each time, they are meant to be held against the same horse a season later.
- Stride length
- How far the horse travels in one complete cycle, reported against its own frame so a big horse and a small one compare honestly.
- Cadence and rhythm
- Strides per minute, and how much each stride varies from the one before it.
- Duty factor
- The share of the stride a limb spends on the ground. A walk has no moment of suspension, so anything under half is impossible and is caught.
- Overstep
- Whether the hind foot lands ahead of the print the front foot left, and by how much.
- Head carriage
- The rise and fall of the poll through the cycle.
- Fetlock drop
- How far the fetlock sinks under load.
What is missing matters as much: nothing on this list compares one side of the horse with the other. That work is not finished, so those figures are not published.
Twenty-one landmarks cleared the floor. Ten did not, and you can see which.
This is one real walk, ten seconds, 241 frames from a handheld phone. Each bar is the share of those frames a landmark was actually found in. The line at 0.90 is the floor a landmark has to clear before any figure is allowed to use it.
Near side · 21/21 kept
Far side · 0/10 kept
The far side of a horse is behind the near side for most of a walk. The landmark model was trained on standing photographs, so as the legs cross it loses the far limb rather than tracking it through — the far hock was found in one frame out of 241. Every figure that would compare one side of the horse with the other therefore has no data underneath it, and is withheld rather than estimated.
It is the single thing most worth fixing, and it is being worked on. Until it is, this chart is the honest state of the product, and it is on the front page rather than in a footnote.
Anything can print a number. The hard part is knowing when not to.
It will not tell you what the movement means
It measures and it reports the measurement. What a figure means about a particular horse is a veterinary judgement, and it stays one.
It cannot yet compare one side with the other
The landmark model was trained on standing photographs of horses, so it cannot reliably tell the near leg from the far leg as the two cross. Every left-against-right figure is therefore withheld, and stays withheld until that work is finished. What you read today is how the horse moves, not whether one side differs from the other.
It will not score footage it cannot read
If the tracking loses a hoof, or the measured stride would put a hind print closer than the limbs are mounted apart, the read is withheld and names the check that failed.
It will not quote you an accuracy figure
No validation study has been run. Until one exists, with its protocol written before anyone sees the data, there is no percentage worth printing here. When there is a figure, the study behind it will be published alongside it.
It will never stand in for your vet or your own eye
It is decision support on both sides of the consultation: for an owner, a record to bring to the vet; for a vet, a second record beside their own examination. It is never a diagnosis, and it does not replace a veterinary examination.
Still being built
No date, and we are not going to invent one. Leave an address and we will write when there is something worth your time.