Intelligent Sensing and Analysis of Foot Pressures, Sit-Interface Pressures and Lower-Limb Kinematics and Kinetics during Suspended Elliptical Gait Training for Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury

Spinal cord injury (SCI) causes various degrees of limb paralysis depending on the site of injury whereby the motor function for daily physical activity is reduced. A long-term declining of joint contracture, muscular atrophy, peripheral circulation and cardiopulmonary function is also accompanied. Elliptical gait trainer is used to provide an “upper-limb active and lower-limb passive” training for SCI individuals. A suspension device is needed to support body weight but an adequate load to lower limbs is still needed to enable lower-limb movement and force lower-limb muscular contraction. However, researches about corresponding physiological mechanisms and the effects on gait, lower-limb kinematics, kinetics, and cardiopulmonary functions are less investigated. This integrated proposal incorporates virtual reality and elliptical gait training to help SCI individual increasing lower-limb effort and reconstructing central pattern generator and encourage continue exercise. An intelligent sensing of foot pressures, inertial, sit-interface pressures, suspending force, myoelectric activity, muscular tissue oxygenation, and heart rate and fatigue expression derived from face images is used to quantify the efficacy of training and avoid exercise injury. Three sub-proposals, "Intelligent sensing and analysis of foot pressures, sit-interface pressures and lower-limb kinematics and kinetics during suspended elliptical gait training for individuals with spinal cord injury" (sub-proposal 1), "Development of a novel elliptical gait trainer for individuals with spinal cord injury – Gait normalization and forced exercise" (sub-proposal 2), and "Development of a virtual reality based guiding system incorporated with facial image processing for individuals with spinal cord injury in gait training" (sub-proposal 3) are organized to implement the above goals. The goal of this sub-proposal (sub-proposal 1) is illustrated separately by three years. In the first year, pedals with multi-point foot pressures, three-axial forces, and inertial will be developed for further analysis of electromyogram, lower-limb load-bearing, ankle’s torque and kinematics. In the second year, a suspending cushion with a sensing of sit-interface pressures will be developed. Tradeoff between suspending force and lower-limb load-bearing will be investigated based on dynamic characteristics of electromyogram and kinematics. In the third year, three modes of elliptical gait training by active, passive, and forced exercise will be developed and conducted by data fusion of kinematics and physiological information. The gait variability, lower-limb manipulation, and muscular tissue oxygenation in SCI individuals during elliptical gait training of different exercise modes will be compared.

Project ID:PB10901-0596
External Project ID:MOST107-2221-E182-008-MY3