Development of Portable Gait-Event Detection System for FES Locomotion of Hemiplegic Patient

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a portable gait-event detection system which is necessary for the cycle-to-cycle FES(functional electrical stimulation) control of locomotion. Proposed gait-event detection system consists of a signal measurement part and gait event detection part. To make the system portable, we made following modifications from the previous wired system. That is, 1) to make the system wireless using Bluetooth communication, 2) to make the system small-sized and battery-powered by using low power consumption microprocessor. We also used a video camera system to get the reference gait events. The gait-events were detected offline at the main computer using ANN(Artificial Neural Network) of Machine learning technique. The proposed system showed no mis-detection of the gait-events of normal subject and hemiplegia subjects. The performance of the system was better than the previous wired-system, probably due to the reduction of unnatural movement during gait signal measurement. It is expected that the result of this study will be useful in the design of cycle-to-cycle FES controller.