Development of Smart Cue Shoes for Patients with Parkinson Disease( I )

Parkinson disease (PD) is a neural degenerative disease with high prevalence in elder population. Gait disturbances are common in people with (PD) including slow walking speed, start hesitation, and freezing of gait. Improving the walking ability can decrease patients’ dependency and improve their quality of life. Visual cues and auditory cues are commonly used in clinics to provide space and temporal information for individuals with PD to improve their walking ability. However, these cuing methods are limited to pre-designed lab or home environments. Gait disturbance usually occurred at unfamiliar challenging environments. Therefore, development of portable cuing devices which can provide adequate cues in different environments is important. The conventional cuing devices provide visual cue through cane, walker, or virtual reality goggle. However, the cue provided by these devices do not match gait pattern or merge to the true environment. In additions, most of PD patients have gait disturbances are not cane/walker users. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to develop smart cuing shoes for Parkinson disease which can provide visual cue according to gait pattern in various environments. There are three sub projects. Project 1 will investigate the clinical gait pattern of PD detected by pressure insole, establish the clinical specification for the smart cuing shoes, and analyze the effect on patients’ physical activities. Project 2 will develop wearable modules for real-time measures and detection of gait type and gait patterns based on foot pressures and angles’ accelerations and angular velocities. The detected gait type and patterns will serve as feedbacks to real-time adjust visual cue. Project 3 will develop a visual-cue device with a force sensitive resistor as the pressure sensor and a circuit as switch control of a laser diode in the first year. In the second year, the device will be integrated with Project 2 to become a smart visual-cue device with a microprocessor. This project will also collaborate with ITRI for the insole with array of pressure sensors. The most novel features of our smart cuing shoes are listed as follows: 1. Determine the distance of laser-guided cue lines based on the estimated stride lengths; 2. Switch laser sources based on gait clearances to main the desired cue lines; 3. Detect gait’s turning right/left based on angle deflections, then change laser sources.

Project ID:PC10703-0073
External Project ID:MOST106-2218-E182-003