Deans' stroke musings: Gait analysis assisted by robotic walker in patients with post-stroke hemiparesis

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Gait analysis assisted by robotic walker in patients with post-stroke hemiparesis

What a novel idea. Objective analysis of a post-stroke gait. Why hasn't this been done and taught in PT schools? If you don't objectively know what the problems are you can never tell if those problems are resolved and exactly what protocols corrected them. This is just a microcosm of all the problems in stroke rehab.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1753-6561/8/S4/P267

Flávia Loterio^* and Teodiano Bastos-Filho

* Corresponding author: Flávia Loterio

Author Affiliations

Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória, ES, Brazil

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BMC Proceedings 2014, 8(Suppl 4):P267 doi:10.1186/1753-6561-8-S4-P267

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1753-6561/8/S4/P267

Published:

1 October 2014

© 2014 Loterio and Bastos-Filho; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Poster presentation

Stroke is the leading cause of motor dysfunction in adults worldwide. The motor impairment, characteristic of a post-stroke patient, is the hemiparetic gait. This paper proposes a gait analysis assisted by a robotic walker in patients with post-stroke hemiparesis. The test group will have two categories: the first consisting of healthy subjects, and the second one by subjects with post-stroke hemiparesis. Both groups will perform an initial trajectory without the aid of a walker, and another one with its assistance. This route is a straight line, in a flat ground. After training with the walker, volunteers participating repeat the trajectory using the device. The robotic walker is equipped with 3D force sensors in the forearm support, which can confirm the correct weight applied to it. It also can deduce the subject's movement intentions, through the efforts made by his/her upper limbs. Spatio-temporal parameters of gait using inertial sensors will be analyzed. These sensors will be placed in specific points of the subject's legs, and a laser scanning sensor will be located in the center of the walker in order to get distances to the legs. Electromyography (EMG) electrodes will be also placed on the subject's legs to evaluate the muscle activity and energy consumption during the gaits. After analyzing the data, the results will be compared between the two groups and between the gaits before and after the training. The results might be useful for the process of rehabilitation of post-stroke patients, and in normal and hemiparetic gait.