An inertial sensor mounted on the foot of the affected body side represents an alternative to traditional foot switches in Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES)assisted gait rehabilitation systems. The inertial sensor consisting of 3 gyroscopes and 3 accelerometers can be utilised to detect gait phases which can be applied to synchronise the electrical stimulation with the gait. Additionally, the sensor can be applied to estimate orientation and 3 dimensional movement of the foot. Based on the estimated orientation and linear position several movement parameters can be defined. The most important are the foot clearance, which is defined as maximal distance between foot and ground, and the sagittal angle of the foot in relation to the ground at the time as the heel hits the ground. In this paper we describe a practical system for FES-assisted gait training based on inertial sensors where the electrical stimulation is triggered by the gait phase detection and the stimulation intensity is automatically tuned by feedback of movement parameters.
In the individuals investigated, an eight weeks series of therapeutic riding did not improve posture control and had only a small positive effect on gait performance. The reasons for these rather disappointing results could have been the low number of therapeutic riding sessions (0.5 sessions per week), and the relatively short duration (30 min) of each session. It remains to be seen, whether a higher density and longer duration of therapeutic riding sessions yields better results.
Quantitative gait analysis plays an important role in neurological and orthopedic rehabilitation regarding the evaluation of rehabilitation progress. However, most of the currently available gait analysis systems share the disadvantage of being expensive, time-consuming, and complex. A promising alternative is the portable gait analysis system RehaWatch. It is based on inertial sensors that allow the quantitative measurement of the important kinemetric variables acceleration and angular velocity. The associated software analyzes the sensor signals and calculates temporal (e.g., stride duration, gait phases) and spatial (e.g., stride length, foot angle) parameters on this basis. The aim of this study was to investigate the intraobserver reliability of RehaWatch. A total of 44 healthy subjects (age: 27.7±4.2 years) were included in the study. Each participant underwent three measurements (walking distance: 20 m) for each of the three sessions with a time interval of 48 h in-between. Variance analysis (General Linear Model) revealed no significant differences between gait parameters at different measuring points. ICCs (Average Measure Intraclass Correlations) were between 0.691 and 0.959. In addition to the results of the variance and correlation analysis the Bland-Altman plots suggest high reliability.
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