Abstract
Stroke is one of the most significant causes of permanent functional impairment and severe motor disability. Hemiplegia or hemiparesis are common consequences of the acute event, which negatively impacts daily life and requires continuous rehabilitation treatments to favor partial or complete recovery and, consequently, to regain autonomy, independence, and safety in daily activities. Gait impairments are frequent in stroke survivors. The accurate assessment of gait anomalies is therefore crucial and a major focus of neurorehabilitation programs to prevent falls or injuries. This study aims to estimate, using a single RGB-D sensor, gait patterns and parameters on a short walkway. This solution may be suitable for monitoring the improvement or worsening of gait disorders, including in domestic and unsupervised scenarios. For this purpose, some of the most relevant spatiotemporal parameters, estimated by the proposed solution on a cohort of post-stroke individuals, were compared with those estimated by a gold standard system for a simultaneous instrumented 3D gait analysis. Preliminary results indicate good agreement, accuracy, and correlation between the gait parameters estimated by the two systems. This suggests that the proposed solution may be employed as an intermediate tool for gait analysis in environments where gold standard systems are impractical, such as home and ecological settings in real-life contexts.
Highlights
Stroke and cerebrovascular diseases are prominent causes of disability: The consequences of the acute event negatively impact the quality of life and require long-term rehabilitation [1,2] to favor the partial or total recovery of impaired functions
This paper presents a solution for estimating gait patterns and parameters of poststroke individuals using a single camera approach, based on a 3D RGB-D sensor and a short walkway
Robustness, and reliability of the measurements, a subset of the traditional spatiotemporal parameters estimated by the proposed system was compared with that estimated by a simultaneous instrumented 3D gait analysis using an optoelectronic system
Summary
Stroke and cerebrovascular diseases are prominent causes of disability: The consequences of the acute event negatively impact the quality of life and require long-term rehabilitation [1,2] to favor the partial or total recovery of impaired functions. Stroke severely affects several motor skills at different levels as a result of muscular weakness or partial paralysis on one side of the body. Common disabilities concern the motor functions of upper and lower limbs, present in over 80% of stroke survival cases [3]. Visual impairments or peripheral field loss, mostly homonymous hemianopia, are frequent, and limb sensory impairments, exteroceptive or proprioceptive, affect about half of stroke survivals [4]. Gait patterns have been extensively analyzed and quantified in post-stroke subjects using threedimensional Gait Analysis (3D-GA), revealing slower and asymmetric gait patterns [9], abnormal kinematics, and reduced ankle power during terminal stance [10]
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