Prospective horse owners depend on pre-purchase exams to uncover issues that could potentially affect a horse’s performance — particularly hidden lameness.

Adam Pendleton, an equine veterinarian and farrier, discussed a pre-purchase exam he conducted on a 10-year-old Quarter Horse mare during which he utilized an interesting method to determine the mare’s soundness: the Equinosis Q with Lameness Locator.

The Equinosis Q, which is manufactured by Columbia, Mo.-based Equinosis LLC, uses wireless sensors to track a horse’s movement accurately to less than 1 millimeter. It uses algorithms that compute precise lameness metrics the human eye can’t detect.

“The Equinosis Q is a system of inertial sensors, and it measures gait asymmetry, which, in my practice, seems to have really been a huge benefit,” Pendleton told attendees of the Delta Mustad Hoof Care Center Summer Lunchtime Panel at the 2018 International Hoof-Care Summit in Cincinnati, Ohio. “The great thing is that you take the baseline data, and you have a digital copy of that to refer back to. And it’s not subjective.”

He adds that the tool is a very good iden­tifier of gait asym­metry.

“I think we have…