For prosthesis users, knee units can range from simple devices costing $2000 up to $45,000 for high-end, microprocessor-controlled systems. These higher-end electronic knees provide significant advantages in stability, gait, and metabolic rate compared their passive or mechanical counterparts. However, the high cost of such systems makes them inaccessible most amputees. In this study, it was hy...

Conclusions: The Kineassist is a device that allows clinicians and patients to safely perform gait and balance exercises while allowing the clinician to focus on training cues rather than fall protection. The system minimizes disturbance forces and allows patients to move relatively unimpeded during functional tasks and only interferes when loss of balance occurs. However, trajectories are slow...

The objective of this study was to measure gait abnormalities in elderly fallers with the LocometrixTM gait-analysis system. This accelerometric device provided the following gait variables: walking speed and stride frequency, length, symmetry, and regularity. The variables were analyzed over a 20-s period of stable walking on a flat track of 40 m. Participants were 20 elderly patients hospital...

Heel strike detection is an important cue for human gait recognition and detection in visual surveillance since the heel strike position can be used to derive the gait periodicity, stride and step length. We propose a novel method for heel strike detection using a gait trajectory model, which is robust to occlusion, camera view, and low resolution. When a person walks, the movement of the head ...

The purpose of this investigation was to measure the effect of two terminal prosthetic components, the SACH foot and the single axis foot, on the locomotion patterns of unilateral below-knee amputees. The ten subjects who participated in the study were evaluated on two occasions, once following prescription of a PTB prosthesis and one terminal device and once following its replacement with the ...

The ODFS is a mobility aid designed to correct dropped foot following stroke, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury and other upper motor neurone conditions. The device uses small pulses of electrical stimulation applied to the common peroneal nerve using self adhesive skin surface electrodes to elicit dorsiflexion and eversion. This is timed to the gait cycle using a pressure sensitive foot s...

Gait research and clinical gait training may benefit from movement-dependent event control, that is, technical applications in which events such as obstacle appearance or visual/acoustic cueing are (co)determined online on the basis of current gait properties. A prerequisite for successful gait-dependent event control is accurate online detection of gait events such as foot contact (FC) and foo...

OBJECTIVES Kinetic patterns of the lower extremity joints have been shown to be influenced by modification of the location of the center of pressure (CoP) of the foot. The accepted theory is that a shifted location of the CoP alters the distance between the ground reaction force and the center of the joint, thereby modifying torques during gait. Various footwear designs have been reported to si...

Stroke affects 700,000 Americans per year resulting in the largest cause of long-term disability in the United States. Dropfoot is a common condition associated with residual disabilities of stokes and is characterized as a paralysis or weakness of the dorsiflexor muscles of the foot and ankle. The result is an abnormal gait cycle caused by the dragging of the foot and toes during the swing pha...