Acceleration and electromyography (EMG) pattern analysis for children with cerebral palsy

Abstract

This paper presents a framework of gait analysis for children with cerebral palsy (CP) using electromyography (EMG) and acceleration (ACC) signals. In this framework, ACC signals are firstly processed for stride cycle detection and segmentation, and then utilized to reveal kinematic information associated with gait abnormality, whereas the EMG signals are adopted to assess abnormal muscle activation patterns during gait movement. Six CP children with gait abnormalities were recruited to form the CP group , and two children with TD (typical development) were also recruited as the control group for gait analysis experiments. EMG signals from four typical muscles of both legs and vertical acceleration of shanks were collected simultaneously. It can be demonstrated from the experimental results that the proposed method is able to extract ACC and EMG patterns, indicating its clinical potential for the assessment and therapy of lower extremity functions for children with CP.