Gait adaptations of transfemoral prosthesis users across multiple walking tasks.

Background: For people with lower extremity amputations, the decreased confidence and suboptimal gait associated with dynamic instability can negatively affect mobility and quality of life. Quantifying dynamic instability could enhance clinical decision making related to lower extremity prosthetics and inform future prosthetic research.

Objective: To quantitatively examine gait adaptations in transfemoral amputees across various walking conditions.

Angular-velocity control approach for stance-control orthoses.

Currently, stance-control knee orthoses require external control mechanisms to control knee flexion during stance and allow free knee motion during the swing phase of gait. A new angular-velocity control approach that uses a rotary-hydraulic device to resist knee flexion when the knee angular velocity passes a preset threshold is presented. This angular-velocity approach for orthotic stance control is based on the premise that knee-flexion angular velocity during a knee-collapse event, such as a stumble or fall, is greater than that during walking.

Plantar pressure parameters for dynamic gait stability analysis.

Dynamic stability measurement is necessary to evaluate human performance over a variety of locomotor environments. In this paper, the suitability of parameters extracted from plantar-pressure measurements as input into a dynamic stability model was investigated. FScan in-shoe pressure data were collected from 15 subjects as they completed four successively more unstable walking tasks.

Service delivery trends for a physical rehabilitation outreach program.

Purpose: Evaluate clinical service characteristics of a physical rehabilitation outreach clinic.

Method: A retrospective analysis on service-related factors and patient information (every clinical encounter between 1983 and 2002) was performed on the Terry Fox Mobile Clinic. The Terry Fox Mobile Clinic provided multidisciplinary physical rehabilitation outreach services for adults with disabilities in Eastern and North Eastern Ontario, Canada (on-site visits by rehabilitation specialists).

T.120 application sharing for the remote configuration of prostheses.

We conducted a study to determine whether application sharing and desktop videoconferencing using the Internet constituted a viable method for remotely configuring a microprocessor-controlled lower-extremity prosthesis. A DSL broadband connection (operated at 256 kbit/s) was used to connect two prosthetic care facilities over the public Internet. PC-based videoconferencing was used with application sharing for the remote configuration of the prosthesis and to view information on the load and angle of the prosthetic knee.

A shockwave approach for web-based clinical motion analysis.

Advances in Internet connectivity and personal multimedia computing have created opportunities for integrating simple motion analysis into clinical practice. The Macromedia Shockwave environment provides tools for creating media-rich software that runs within a Web browser. For this project, clinical motion analysis software was created using Shockwave that can load digital video clips of a client's motion, step/shuttle/play through the clip, superimpose a grid over the video image, measure relative joint angles, scale to a linear factor, measure distances, and measure average velocities.