Noninvasive spinal stimulation improves walking in chronic stroke survivors: a proof-of-concept case series.

Background: After stroke, restoring safe, independent, and efficient walking is a top rehabilitation priority. However, in nearly 70% of stroke survivors asymmetrical walking patterns and reduced walking speed persist. This case series study aims to investigate the effectiveness of transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) in enhancing walking ability of persons with chronic stroke.

Early Prediction of Poststroke Rehabilitation Outcomes Using Wearable Sensors.

Objective: Inpatient rehabilitation represents a critical setting for stroke treatment, providing intensive, targeted therapy and task-specific practice to minimize a patient's functional deficits and facilitate their reintegration into the community. However, impairment and recovery vary greatly after stroke, making it difficult to predict a patient's future outcomes or response to treatment. In this study, the authors examined the value of early-stage wearable sensor data to predict 3 functional outcomes (ambulation, independence, and risk of falling) at rehabilitation discharge.

Validity and reliability of a commercial wearable sensor system for measuring spatiotemporal gait parameters in a post-stroke population: the effects of walking speed and asymmetry.

Commercial wearable sensor systems are a promising alternative to costly laboratory equipment for clinical gait evaluation, but their accuracy for individuals with gait impairments is not well established. Therefore, we investigated the validity and reliability of the APDM Opal wearable sensor system to measure spatiotemporal gait parameters for healthy controls and individuals with chronic stroke.Participants completed the 10 m walk test over an instrumented mat three times in different speed conditions.

Soft robotic exosuit augmented high intensity gait training on stroke survivors: a pilot study.

Background: Stroke is a leading cause of serious gait impairments and restoring walking ability is a major goal of physical therapy interventions. Soft robotic exosuits are portable, lightweight, and unobtrusive assistive devices designed to improve the mobility of post-stroke individuals through facilitation of more natural paretic limb function during walking training. However, it is unknown whether long-term gait training using soft robotic exosuits will clinically impact gait function and quality of movement post-stroke.

Rapid Screening of Physiological Changes Associated With COVID-19 Using Soft-Wearables and Structured Activities: A Pilot Study.

Objective: Controlling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic largely depends on scaling up the testing infrastructure for identifying infected individuals. Consumer-grade wearables may present a solution to detect the presence of infections in the population, but the current paradigm requires collecting physiological data continuously and for long periods of time on each individual, which poses limitations in the context of rapid screening. Technology: Here, we propose a novel paradigm based on recording the physiological responses elicited by a short (~2 minutes) sequence of activities (i.

Does kinematic gait quality improve with functional gait recovery? A longitudinal pilot study on early post-stroke individuals.

Typical clinical gait outcomes mostly focus on function; only sparse information exists on gait quality, i.e. symmetry or more natural gait patterns.

Quantifying dosage of physical therapy using lower body kinematics: a longitudinal pilot study on early post-stroke individuals.

Background: While therapy is an important part of the recovery process, there is a lack of quantitative data detailing the "dosage" of therapy received due to the limitations on in/outpatient accessibility and mobility. Advances in wearable sensor technology have allowed us to obtain an unprecedented glimpse into joint-level kinematics in an unobtrusive manner. The objective of this observational longitudinal pilot study was to evaluate the relations between lower body joint kinematics during therapy and functional gait recovery over the first three months after stroke.

An Online Transition of Speed-dependent Reference Joint Trajectories for Robotic Gait Training.

Rehabilitation robots reduce the physical burden on therapists, quantify training and allow greater dose of therapy on individuals with neurological impairments. Robots are also capable of precisely customizing therapy based on the user's physiology and/or needs, for example, customizing a reference trajectory for gait training. While a number of methods for obtaining reference gait patterns have been proposed, these approaches lack the ability of altering the trajectories according to the varying walking speed in real-time.

Sensitivity comparison of inertial to optical motion capture during gait: implications for tracking recovery.

Wearable sensors provide a foundation for development of wearable robotic technology to be used in clinical applications. Inertial motion capture (IMC) has emerged as a viable alternative to more cumbersome, non-portable optical methods. Previous work has validated the accuracy of IMC for gait compared to optical motion capture (OMC).

Statistical method for prediction of gait kinematics with Gaussian process regression.

We propose a novel methodology for predicting human gait pattern kinematics based on a statistical and stochastic approach using a method called Gaussian process regression (GPR). We selected 14 body parameters that significantly affect the gait pattern and 14 joint motions that represent gait kinematics. The body parameter and gait kinematics data were recorded from 113 subjects by anthropometric measurements and a motion capture system.

Intentional Movement Performance Ability (IMPA): a method for robot-aided quantitative assessment of motor function.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new assessment method for evaluating motor function of the patients who are suffering from physical weakness after stroke, incomplete spinal cord injury (iSCI) or other diseases. In this work, we use a robotic device to obtain the information of interaction occur between patient and robot, and use it as a measure for assessing the patients. The Intentional Movement Performance Ability (IMPA) is defined by the root mean square of the interactive torque, while the subject performs given periodic movement with the robot.