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Children with unilateral cerebral palsy had more movement deviations than typically developing children in unimanual tasks. A strong relationship was found between movement deviations of the impaired upper limb and bimanual performance.

This paper presents a novel sensor-to-segment calibration procedure for inertial sensor-based knee joint kinematics analysis during cycling. This procedure was designed to be feasible in-field, autonomously, and without any external operator or device. It combines a static standing up posture and a pedaling task. The main goal of this study was to assess the accuracy of the new sensor-to-segment calibration method (denoted as the ‘cycling’ method) by calculating errors in terms of body-segment orientations and 3D knee joint angles using inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based and optoelectronic-based motion capture. To do so, 14 participants were evaluated during pedaling motion at a workload of 100 W, which enabled comparisons of the cycling method with conventional calibration methods commonly employed in gait analysis. The accuracy of the cycling method was comparable to that of other methods concerning the knee flexion/extension angle, and did not exceed 3.8°. However, the cycling method presented the smallest errors for knee internal/external rotation (6.65 ± 1.94°) and abduction/adduction (5.92 ± 2.85°). This study demonstrated that a calibration method based on the completion of a pedaling task combined with a standing posture significantly improved the accuracy of 3D knee joint angle measurement when applied to cycling analysis.

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Reliability and minimal detectable change of body-weight distribution and body swaybetween right and left brain-damaged patients at a chronic stage.

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International audienceIntroduction The asymmetry of support when walking, common after a stroke, is a known risk factor for falls. The objective of this study is to assess effects of muscle vibrations on various sites on correcting this asymmetry. Methods Twenty-one patients (61 ± 13 years) with hemiplegia (10 right, 11 left) chronic vascular (mean time post stroke 48 ± 44months) received vibratory stimulation transcutaneous 70 Hz at the posterior cervical lesion contralateral muscles (NMV), the gluteus medius lesion side (GMV) and the biceps contralateral lesion (sham). An analysis of the percentage of one-foot support measured by GAITRite was performed before, during, and 2 and 10 minutes after each stimulation. Results Before stimulation, supporting asymmetry is noted with a percentage of the push side hemiplegic averaged 31.5% (±6.0%, min = 20%, max = 37%). Under GMV we find that this increases to 35.0% (±5.9%, min = 28.8%, max = 41.2%) against 31.1% (±7.5%, min = 20%, max = 42%) in NMV and 32.0% (±6.9%, min = 28.6%, max = 39.4%) in the sham. 2 minutes, the effect persists for GMV stimulation with 35.5% (±9.0%, min = 35%, max = 42.4%) 4% improvement then disappears in 10 minutes. The results are more significant in left hemiplegia with 7% improvement for GMV (P < 0.005). There is a more moderate effect on the NMV with a post effect at 2 min (32.6%) and 10 min (32.2%). Discussion–conclusion Vibratory stimulations therefore seem to improve support asymmetric walking hemiplegic patients. Different kinetic effect is observed between the cervical stimulation and gluteus medius. These results seem to reflect a different pathophysiology between the gluteus medius and cervical postural muscles. These could act through a central mechanism of spatial cognition while the hip muscles have a more immediate effect proprioceptive device. These analyses were complemented by a 3D gait analysis in an attempt to better understand the mechanisms of adaptation. This is the first study concerned with the effectiveness of vibratory stimulation on dynamic balanc

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