Towards a Mobile Gait Analysis for Patients with a Spinal Cord Injury: A Robust Algorithm Validated for Slow Walking Speeds

Spinal cord injury (SCI) patients suffer from diverse gait deficits depending on the severity of their injury. Gait assessments can objectively track the progress during rehabilitation and support clinical decision making, but a comprehensive gait analysis requires far more complex setups and time-c...

Description complète

Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Charlotte Werner, Chris Awai Easthope, Armin Curt, László Demkó
Format: article
Langue:EN
Publié: MDPI AG 2021
Sujets:
IMU
Accès en ligne:https://doaj.org/article/34bd6e00a6e649e79f75336aea72b039
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
Description
Résumé:Spinal cord injury (SCI) patients suffer from diverse gait deficits depending on the severity of their injury. Gait assessments can objectively track the progress during rehabilitation and support clinical decision making, but a comprehensive gait analysis requires far more complex setups and time-consuming protocols that are not feasible in the daily clinical routine. As using inertial sensors for mobile gait analysis has started to gain ground, this work aimed to develop a sensor-based gait analysis for the specific population of SCI patients that measures the spatio-temporal parameters of typical gait laboratories for day-to-day clinical applications. The proposed algorithm uses shank-mounted inertial sensors and personalized thresholds to detect steps and gait events according to the individual gait profiles. The method was validated in nine SCI patients and 17 healthy controls walking on an instrumented treadmill while wearing reflective markers for motion capture used as a gold standard. The sensor-based algorithm (i) performed similarly well for the two cohorts and (ii) is robust enough to cover the diverse gait deficits of SCI patients, from slow (0.3 m/s) to preferred walking speeds.