Gait impairment is a prevalent and important difficulty for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), a common neurological disorder. An easy to use tool to objectively evaluate gait in MS patients in a clinical setting can assist clinicians to perform an objective assessment. The overall objective of this study is to develop a framework to quantify gait abnormalities in MS patients using the Microsoft Kinect for the Windows sensor; an inexpensive, easy to use, portable camera. Specifically, we aim to evaluate its feasibility for utilization in a clinical setting, assess its reliability, evaluate the validity of gait indices obtained, and evaluate a novel set of gait indices based on the concept of dynamic time warping. In this study, ten ambulatory MS patients, and ten age and sex-matched normal controls were studied at one session in a clinical setting with gait assessment using a Kinect camera. The expanded disability status scale (EDSS) clinical ambulation score was calculated for the MS subjects, and patients completed the Multiple Sclerosis walking scale (MSWS). Based on this study, we established the potential feasibility of using a Microsoft Kinect camera in a clinical setting. Seven out of the eight gait indices obtained using the proposed method were reliable with intraclass correlation coefficients ranging from 0.61 to 0.99. All eight MS gait indices were significantly different from those of the controls (p-values less than 0.05). Finally, seven out of the eight MS gait indices were correlated with the objective and subjective gait measures (Pearson's correlation coefficients greater than 0.40). This study shows that the Kinect camera is an easy to use tool to assess gait in MS patients in a clinical setting.
Simulation of large-scale multibody systems with unilateral contacts requires formulations with which good computational performance can be achieved. The availability of many solver algorithms for Linear Complementarity Problems (LCP) makes the LCP-based formulations a good candidate for this. However, considering friction in contacts asks for new friction models compatible with this kind of formulations. Here, a new, regularized friction model is presented to approximate the Coulomb model, which allows to formulate the multibody system dynamics as a LCP with bounds. Moreover, a bristle approach is used to approximate the stiction force, so that it improves the numerical behaviour of the system and makes it able to handle redundancy coming from the friction interfaces. Several examples using a 3D wheel model has been carried out, and the proposed friction model shows a better approximation of the Coulomb model compared to other LCP-based formulations.
One of the major challenges in dynamics of multibody systems is to handle redundant constraints appropriately. The box friction model is one of the existing approaches to formulate the contact and friction phenomenon as a mixed linear complementarity problem (MLCP). In this setting, the contact redundancy can be handled by relaxing the constraints, but such a technique might suffer from certain drawbacks, specially in the case of large number of redundant constraints. Most of the common pivoting algorithms used to solve the resulting mixed complementarity problem might not converge when the relaxation terms are chosen as small as they should be. To overcome the aforementioned shortcoming, we propose a novel approach which takes advantage of the sparse structure of the formulated MLCP. This novel approach reduces the sensitivity of the solution of the problem to the relaxation terms and decreases the number of required pivots to obtain the solution, leading to shorter computational times. Furthermore, as a result of the proposed approach, much smaller relaxation terms can be used while the solution algorithms converge.
In this study, effects of some of the foot modelling assumptions on the ankle kinematics and dynamics are investigated based on the experimental data. For the kinematics analysis, the appropriateness of the stationary axis of rotation of the human ankle flexion is examined. Moreover, an interpolated function which is capable of predicting the directional changes of this axis is proposed. For the dynamics analysis, two main modelling assumptions of the number of the foot segments and the dimension of the foot model are the subject of the study. To this end, the ankle joint torque and power are selected as the comparison indicators and inverse dynamics analyses are carried out. The analyses show that the number of segments of the foot model does not have a considerable effect on the calculated ankle joint torque. On the other hand, the calculated ankle power is highly affected by both of the segmentation and the dimension of the foot model.
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