Effective gait rehabilitation is challenging, often requiring strenuous effort from a therapist, or expensive technology, or both. One rehabilitation method involves assisting the patient’s foot through a gait-like trajectory. While numerous devices have been developed to address the gait training needs of adults, these tools do not always scale well to meet the needs of a child’s smaller body ...

Exertion may alter running mechanics and increase injury risk. Effects of exertion following gait-retraining are unknown. Objectives: To determine how effects load rates, footstrike, c...

For physical therapists, modifying technique is not a novel concept; however, our motives are typically focused on symptom and injury reduction rather than purely performance. These specific modifications are based on minimizing tissue load, while still enabling successful completion of the task. Applying this same rationale to running, an activity in which up to 80% of participants are injured...

Symptomatic knee osteoarthritis is one of the most common types of osteoarthritis and is one of the top ten causes of years of life lost due to disability. One common treatment strategy involves the prolonged use of anti-inflammatory medications. Recently, gait retraining has been proposed as non-invasive and non-pharmacological treatment option for knee osteoarthritis. However, many possible g...

Control of human walking is not thoroughly understood, which has implications in developing suitable strategies for the retraining of a functional gait following neurological injuries such as spinal cord injury (SCI). Bipedal robots allow us to investigate simple elements of the complex nervous system to quantify their contribution to motor control. RunBot is a bipedal robot which operates thro...

Five patients with symptomatic knee hyperextension thrusting patterns due to posterolateral ligament complex injury underwent gait analysis before and after a gait retraining program. Patients were trained to avoid knee hyperextension by 1) walking with their knees slightly flexed throughout stance, 2) maintaining ankle dorsiflexion in early stance, and 3) maintaining an erect trunk-hip attitud...