A novel walking cane with haptic biofeedback reduces knee adduction moment in the osteoarthritic knee.

Knee osteoarthritis is a leading cause of ambulatory disability in adults. The most prescribed mobility aid, the walking cane, is often underloaded and therefore fails to reduce knee joint loading and provide symptomatic relief. For this study, a novel walking cane with haptic biofeedback was designed to improve cane loading and reduce the knee adduction moment (KAM).

A smart cane with vibrotactile biofeedback improves cane loading for people with knee osteoarthritis.

Nine million adults have symptomatic knee osteoarthritis (OA) in the U.S. and almost half of those people have a walking aid such as a cane.

Modular organization across changing task demands in healthy and poststroke gait.

Our goal was to link impaired module patterns to mobility task performance in persons poststroke. Kinematic, kinetic, and electromyography (EMG) data were collected from 27 poststroke subjects and from 17 healthy control subjects. Each subject walked on a treadmill at their self-selected walking speed in addition to a randomized block design of four steady-state mobility capability tasks: walking at maximum speed, and walking at self-selected speed with maximum cadence, maximum step length, and maximum step height.

The influence of locomotor rehabilitation on module quality and post-stroke hemiparetic walking performance.

Recent studies have suggested the biomechanical subtasks of walking can be produced by a reduced set of co-excited muscles or modules. Individuals post-stroke often exhibit poor inter-muscular coordination characterized by poor timing and merging of modules that are normally independent in healthy individuals. However, whether locomotor therapy can influence module composition and timing and whether these improvements lead to improved walking performance is unclear.