Simulation of human gait with body weight support: benchmarking models and unloading strategies.

Background: Gait training with partial body weight support (BWS) has become an established rehabilitation technique. Besides passive unloading mechanisms such as springs or counterweights, also active systems that allow rendering constant or modulated vertical forces have been proposed. However, only pilot studies have been conducted to compare different unloading or modulation strategies, and conducting experimental studies is costly and time-consuming.

Correction to: Influence of body weight unloading on human gait characteristics: a systematic review.

The original article [1] contained a major error whereby Figure 1 mistakenly displayed a duplicate of Figure 5.

Influence of body weight unloading on human gait characteristics: a systematic review.

Background: Body weight support (BWS) systems have shown promise as rehabilitation tools for neurologically impaired individuals. This paper reviews the experiment-based research on BWS systems with the aim: (1) To investigate the influence of body weight unloading (BWU) on gait characteristics; (2) To study whether the effects of BWS differ between treadmill and overground walking and (3) To investigate if modulated BWU influences gait characteristics less than unmodulated BWU.

Method: A systematic literature search was conducted in the following search engines: Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.