Seventy-three spinal cord injured patients with central cord syndrome who had undergone inpatient rehabilitation, were studied retrospectively with regard to their demographic, neurologic and functional characteristics. There were 67 males and six females with a mean age of 53.5 years. Falls was the commonest mechanism of injury (54.8%) followed by motor vehicle accidents. Eleven patients sustained cervical fractures and 41 had radiological evidence of cervical spondylosis. Seventeen patients had sensory impairment and signi®cant spasticity was present in 14 patients. Signi®cant improvements in the admission/discharge ASIA motor scores and Modi®ed Barthel Index (MBI) scores (P50.001) were noted after rehabilitation. Ninety-two percent of patients were continent of bladder on discharge compared to 64.4% on admission. Multiple regression analysis revealed three factors associated with a better functional outcome, namely, higher admission MBI scores, absence of spasticity and younger age (P50.05).

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For decades, robotic devices have been suggested to enhance motor recovery by replicating clinical manualassisted training. This paper presents an overground gait rehabilitation robot, which consists of a pair of robotic orthoses, the connected pelvic arm in parallel and a mounted mobile platform. The overground walking incorporates pelvic control together with active joints on the lower limb. As a preliminary evaluation, system trials have been conducted on healthy subjects and a spinal cord injury (SCI) subject, respectively. Electromyography signals were recorded from muscles of the lower limb for each subject. Three experiments were carried out: (i) health volunteers walking at self-preferred walking speed, (ii) a SCI subject walking with the help of three helpers and (iii) the same SCI subject walking with the assistance provided by the gait device. In the experiment, the muscle activation of overground walking was compared between the manual-assisted and robotic-assisted methods. The initial results show that the performance of the device can provide impact-less overground walking and it is comparable to the performance obtained by manual assistance in gait rehabilitation training.

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In this paper, we propose a gait generation concept for rehabilitation, in which GaitGen, a gait pattern generator is introduced. The concept of GaitGen will be explained. GaitGen aims to provide objective gait planning for rehabilitation. Gait-related studies have been carried out for the validation and enhancement of GaitGen. Motion capture system has been used for gait database collection. An established equation of normalized gait parameters has been studied via GAITRite. The paper ends with a summary of results, findings, and future works.