An Acceleration-Based Gait Assessment Method for Children with Cerebral Palsy.

Xiang Chen,De Wu,Xu Zhang,Shuai Cao,Songmei Liao

doi:10.3390/s17051002

Abstract

With the aim of providing an objective tool for motion disability assessment in clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation therapy of cerebral palsy (CP) patients, an acceleration-based gait assessment method was proposed in this paper. To capture gait information, three inertial measurement units (IMUs) were placed on the lower trunk and thigh, respectively. By comparing differences in the gait acceleration modes between children with CP and healthy subjects, an assessment method based on grey relational analysis and five gait parameters, including Pearson coefficient, variance ratio, the number of extreme points, harmonic ratio and symmetry was established. Twenty-two children with cerebral palsy (7.49 ± 2.86 years old), fourteen healthy adults (24.2 ± 1.55 years old) and ten healthy children (7.03 ± 1.49 years old) participated in the gait data acquisition experiment. The results demonstrated that, compared to healthy subjects, the symptoms and severity of motor dysfunction of CP children could result in abnormality of the gait acceleration modes, and the proposed assessment method was able to effectively evaluate the degree gait abnormality in CP children.

Highlights

Cerebral palsy (CP) was a syndrome which refers to a group of permanent disorders of movement and posture, and caused by abnormal development of, or damage to the brain in the developing fetal or infant [1,2,3]
The gait assessment model was established based on grey relational analysis [34,35]
The main framework of this study consisted of three major steps: firstly, an inertial measurement units (IMUs)-based gait data acquisition and pre-processing framework were designed; gait acceleration (ACC) data from healthy adults were analyzed to extract representative Characteristic Gait Graphs (CGGs); an ACC-based gait assessment model was proposed based on the gait parameters and grey relational analysis

Summary

Introduction

Cerebral palsy (CP) was a syndrome which refers to a group of permanent disorders of movement and posture, and caused by abnormal development of, or damage to the brain in the developing fetal or infant [1,2,3]. Patients suffering from CP are often associated with upper and lower extremity motor dysfunction, where their lower limb movement disorder often leads to various forms of abnormal gait [4]. Abnormal movements of patients are usually analyzed visually or using questionnaires. The Ashworth Scale, Modified Ashworth Scale and Tardieu Scale are usually used to assess the spasticity of patients by measuring the level of resistance to passive movement [5,6]. The movement dysfunction of patients with CP is usually assessed by the gross motor function classification system (GMFCS) and gross motor function measure (GMFM, including GMFM-88 and GMFM-66) based on self-initiated movements, with emphasis on sitting, transfers, and mobility [7,8,9].

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Discussion

Conclusion