Abstract
Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is important in gait rehabilitation for patients with dropfoot. Since there are time-varying velocities during FES-assisted walking, it is difficult to achieve a good movement performance during walking. To account for the time-varying walking velocities, seven poststroke subjects were recruited and fuzzy logic control and a linear model were applied in FES-assisted walking to enable intensity- and duration-adaptive stimulation (IDAS) for poststroke subjects with dropfoot. In this study, the performance of IDAS was evaluated using kinematic data, and was compared with the performance under no stimulation (NS), FES-assisted walking triggered by heel-off stimulation (HOS), and speed-adaptive stimulation. A larger maximum ankle dorsiflexion angle in the IDAS condition than those in other conditions was observed. The ankle plantar flexion angle in the IDAS condition was similar to that of normal walking. Improvement in the maximum ankle dorsiflexion and plantar flexion angles in the IDAS condition could be attributed to having the appropriate stimulation intensity and duration. In summary, the intensity- and duration-adaptive controller can attain better movement performance and may have great potential in future clinical applications.
Highlights
Stroke is a leading cause of disability in the lower limb, such as dropfoot [1]
The performance of the intensity- and duration-adaptive stimulation (IDAS) was compared with those of stimulation triggered by no stimulation (NS), heel-off stimulation (HOS), and speedadaptive stimulation (SAS) for poststroke patients walking on a treadmill
The purpose of this study was to apply an intensity- and durationadaptive Functional electrical stimulation (FES) control to determine the output of a stimulator and to explore whether the proposed control strategy was appropriate or not for poststroke subjects’ rehabilitation
Summary
A typical cause of dropfoot is muscle weakness, which results in a limited ability to lift the foot voluntarily and an increased risk of falls [2,3,4]. Great effort is made toward the recovery of walking ability for poststroke patients with dropfoot, such as ankle–foot orthoses [5], physical therapy [6], and rehabilitation robot [7]. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a representative intervention to correct dropfoot and to generate foot lift during walking [8, 9]. The footswitch or manual switch was used to time the FES-assisted hemiplegic walking in previous studies, while they were only based on open-loop architectures. The output parameters of the FES required repeated manual re-setting and could not achieve an adaptive adjustment during walking
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