Who Gets to Know How They Move: A Literature Review of Biomechanical Assessment Access, with a Regional Case Study

An elite marathoner gets her stride analyzed on a force plate before her sponsor decides which shoe to put her in. A rural teenager with a painful limp gets a visual inspection, if she gets anything at all. This paper examines the profound and persistent inequity in access to biomechanical movement assessment globally. Through a systematic literature review and a regional case study focusing on South and Southeast Asia, we document how advanced gait and movement analysis technologies remain concentrated in high-income urban settings, sports performance contexts, and well-funded research institutions. We identify structural barriers including equipment cost, technical expertise requirements, infrastructure dependencies, and the absence of validated normative data for diverse populations. We argue that this constitutes a form of movement poverty — a deprivation of the diagnostic and performance insights that movement analysis can provide — with real consequences for health outcomes, athletic development, and rehabilitation access. We conclude by proposing an open, privacy-preserving, community-contributed benchmark as a concrete step toward democratizing movement assessment.