Now if our non-existent stroke leadership could see this as a way to use perturbations to prevent falls post stroke then we might be getting somewhere! ALAS, NO STROKE LEADERSHIP IS OUT THERE! You're screwed if you have a stroke!
Movement research aims to strengthen injury rehab options
Assistant
Professor of Engineering Ryan Schroeder and his team studies the
mechanics and energy flow involved in walking and running, which has
implications for therapies for people with mobility challenges.Anyone who has walked on a suspension bridge or escalator will know the sensation of trying to keep in step with a moving surface.
Assistant Professor of Engineering Ryan Schroeder aims to help people move more efficiently by exploring how humans adjust their movement patterns — such as walking or running — when faced with forces or motions that interact with the body.
“The application of this work is mostly on the rehabilitation side, for example, to help someone in advanced age or recovering from a stroke to walk with more speed and efficiency again,” says Schroeder, who recently joined Brock’s Yousef Haj-Ahmad Department of Engineering.
In a study published earlier this year, Schroeder and his team developed a custom-built mechatronics system to affect changes in body movement when encountering various oscillations.
Participants, who were outfitted with a harness attached to a pulley with wheels on the ceiling, were instructed to walk on a treadmill at their normal pace. The wheels enabled the pulley to keep pace with the individual walking.
Cables were attached both to the pulley on the ceiling and on the sides below the treadmill.
After a short time of walking, the researchers used motors to pull on the cables and pull participants’ bodies upwards and downwards, rhythmically in time.
At first, the pulling was so slight that participants barely noticed, but gradually, it increased until forces just under a third of their own body weight were applied.
As the pulling increased, the researchers recorded if and how synchronization took place, with individuals either consciously or subconsciously matching the cadence of their steps to the external oscillation.
The researchers then repeated the experiment but instead of gradual adjustments to the pulling force, the rate of pulling was varied to see how high or low of a frequency participants would remain synchronized to the pulling forces.
“We used the two experiments to explore how sensitive people were to synchronization with the system at lower forces, and also the range of frequencies they were willing to synchronize to,” says Schroeder.
The team found participants responded most often when the mechanical oscillations closely matched their natural body movements but were also able to continue synchronizing their steps to the machine at higher or lower frequencies up to a point.
Schroeder says that, besides giving more insights into how the body moves, the results have promising implications for rehabilitation.
For example, people tend to walk at much slower speeds when recovering from a stroke, he says.(Well, duh, because your stroke medical 'professionals' HAVE COM PLETELY FAILED AT GETTING THEM 100% RECOVERED!
“One of the rehabilitation goals is to get people walking a little bit faster again,” he says. “We can apply the oscillations at their relatively slow pace where they’re more likely to respond, and over time you can gradually increase those frequencies until they are able to retain healthier walking patterns. This can have a substantial impact on their quality of life.”
He says the results could also guide the development of exoskeletons designed to enhance gait performance.
The team’s results are reported in their study, “Amplitude and frequency of human gait synchronization with a machine oscillator system,” which was published Jan. 10 in the journal Scientific Reports.
No comments:
Post a Comment