Gait is an important part of our life, as it affects many daily activities. Special footwear is fundamental to obtain an ergonomic gait and to extract data for analysis. The plantar foot pressure can be employed to detect many kinds of disorders, suggest improvements in treatments, rehabilitation tasks, patient monitoring, development of orthopedic devices, and other applications. In recent years, attention to this topic has grown and is reflected in many works issued in both commercial and academic groups, and has focused on the development of devices for foot plantar pressure measurement with applications in medicine, sports, and research. First works on this subject appeared around 1963 and have continuously evolved with emerging technologies. This paper reviews the reported developments in the field of footwear-embedded sensors for gait measurement, monitoring, diagnosis, and analysis in rehabilitation. Future work is proposed to improve the field of measurement of the footprint with electronic devices.
With this exhaustive review, we can conclude that the degree of complexity of the rehabilitation device influences in short and long-term therapeutic results since the movements become more controlled. However, there is still a lot of work in the sense of motion control in order to perform trajectories that are more alike the natural movements of humans. There are many control techniques in other areas, which seek to improve the performance of the process. These techniques may possibly be applicable in gait rehabilitation devices, obtaining controllers that are more efficient and that adapts to different people and the necessities that entail every disease. Implications for Rehabilitation Rehabilitation helps people to improve the activities of their daily life, allowing them to observe their progress in the functional abilities as the months pass by with intensive and repetitive therapies. There is a mobility issue when the patient needs to move to the hospital or to the laboratory, which is not always feasible. For overcoming it, patients use the equipment at home to perform their daily therapy. However, they need the sufficient knowledge about its operation, also about the therapeutic movements, the therapy duration and the movement speed. Besides, is necessary to place the equipment in a proper and lively environment that helps to forget or reduce pain while the patient moves his joints progressively. The purpose of robotic rehabilitation devices is to generate repetitive and progressive movements, according to the motor disability. There are training trajectories to follow, which motivate patients to generate active movements. The benefits of robotic rehabilitation depend on the ability of each patient to adapt to the speed and load variations generated by the device, improving and reinforcing motor functions in therapy, especially in patients with advanced disabilities in early rehabilitation. Multi-joint rehabilitation devices are more effective than single-joint rehabilitation devices because they involve a higher number of muscles in the therapy. The greater the number of degrees of freedom (DoF) of the device, it cushions its effect in the patient because the inertia is reduced and higher torques are generated. The assistive technological devices allows to explore different rehabilitation techniques that motivate the patient in therapy, increasing appropriately the energy and pressure in the blood which is reflected in gradually recovering his ability to walk.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.