Motion Capture Technology as a Tool for Quantitative Assessment of the Rehabilitation Progress of Gait by Using Soft Orthoses

Effects of Dynamic Suit Orthoses on the Spatio-Temporal Gait Parameters in Children with Cerebral Palsy: A Systematic Review

“…Regarding the dynamic orthosis models used, the methodological quality of the studies that evaluated the effects of wearing the Adeli suit obtained a percentage of 71%, 34%, and 25% [59,60,63], 59%, and 40% in studies with a Therasuit [34,35], 68%, 59%, and 37% with Theratogs [31,57,62], 65% with external strap orthosis [61], 43% with DEFO [32], 34% with a full suit [63], and 28% in dynamic shirt and pants orthosis [58]. After evaluation with the Oxford scale, seven studies were obtained with C, 4; four studies were obtained with A, 1b; and one study was obtained with B, 3b.…”

“…The time of isolated use of the suit as a single intervention ranged between 10 and 30 min [33,57,61]. A wide range of types of dynamic orthoses were used; thus, two studies used a Therasuit [34,35], another three used the Adeli suit [59,60,63], three used Theratogs [31,57,62], one study used the DEFO pants [32], one used the full-body suit [33], one used dynamic orthosis composed of a T-shirt [58] and pants, and another study evaluated the effects of the external strap orthosis [61]. The intervention protocols varied between the studies and among the participants themselves to set up individualised therapeutic programmes attending to specific needs; thus, balance, walking, climbing stairs, sitting and standing, jumping, resistance, motor control, and coordination exercises were used.…”

“…Most studies that employed exercise programmes performed the post-intervention measurement without the suit, except Skublewska-Paszkowska et al [58], who measured the effects after the intervention with and without the suit. On the other hand, mostly, the immediate effects after the intervention were evaluated, and only a few studies followed up the residual effects of the intervention in the medium-long term [31,32,34,35].…”

“…Ko et al [63] obtained an improvement of 0.29 m/s with the use of the Adeli suit in an 18-week functional exercise programme and an improvement of 0.05 m/s after using the Theratogs in a standing and gait exercise programme. However, the best results for this variable were obtained after an exercise programme performed with the shirt and pants orthosis for 3 months and the immediate measurement wearing the suit (0.31 m/s) [58,62]. Only Matthews et al [32] and Flanagan et al [31] evaluated the permanence of the long-term effects, reporting a decrease in velocity 6 weeks after the DEFO pants intervention phase, with a remaining small effect of reduced parameter variability with respect to the pre-intervention measurement.…”

“…The effects on this variable were evaluated by six of the seven DSO models, since no study evaluated the changes with the DEFO pants model [32]. Of these six DSO models, all registered significant changes in cadence, with the exception of the shirt-and-pants orthosis model [58]. The measurement wearing external strap orthoses and a full-body suit showed immediate improvements in cadence (2.45 step/min and 12.1 step/min, respectively) [33,61].…”