Abstract
Spinal cord injury (SCI) patients suffer from diverse gait deficits depending on the severity of their injury. Gait assessments can objectively track the progress during rehabilitation and support clinical decision making, but a comprehensive gait analysis requires far more complex setups and time-consuming protocols that are not feasible in the daily clinical routine. As using inertial sensors for mobile gait analysis has started to gain ground, this work aimed to develop a sensor-based gait analysis for the specific population of SCI patients that measures the spatio-temporal parameters of typical gait laboratories for day-to-day clinical applications. The proposed algorithm uses shank-mounted inertial sensors and personalized thresholds to detect steps and gait events according to the individual gait profiles. The method was validated in nine SCI patients and 17 healthy controls walking on an instrumented treadmill while wearing reflective markers for motion capture used as a gold standard. The sensor-based algorithm (i) performed similarly well for the two cohorts and (ii) is robust enough to cover the diverse gait deficits of SCI patients, from slow (0.3 m/s) to preferred walking speeds.
Highlights
Spinal cord injury (SCI), either caused by a trauma or disease, leads to permanent changes in the central nervous system
For all the remaining nine SCI patients and 17 healthy controls all trials had a sufficient number of strides and were all included
A novel algorithm that extracts typical spatio-temporal parameters from shank-mounted inertial sensors is proposed for the population of SCI patients
Summary
Spinal cord injury (SCI), either caused by a trauma (e.g., accident) or disease (e.g., tumors), leads to permanent changes in the central nervous system. An accurate gait assessment during rehabilitation can give an insight into the recovery of motor functions and help with clinical decision making due to impairment specific training [4]. In a typical clinical routine, only simple gait tests such as the sixminute walking test are performed [5]. The outcome of these tests is the distance covered or the time to perform the test. The outcome is a comprehensive analysis of the gait kinematics and joint kinetics. These gait laboratories are costly, postprocessing of the data is time-consuming, and the measurements are restricted in both space and duration
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
