A wearable gait assessment system for evaluating post-stroke patients’ rehabilitation

Most of the post stroke patients are common with walking difficulty. The gait pattern could be taken as the severity of the patients. About 88% of stroke patients have certain degrees of hemiparesis. Hemiparesis will attribute to weakness of one side of the body. For post-stroke patients, the rehabilitation is a tedious and long term process. It needs tremendous medical cost and care manpower. Therefore, how to develop a simple wearable device for evaluating the rehabilitation outcome becomes a needful clinical issue. In this study, two wearable devices with accelerometer and gyroscope are placed in both sides of foot. Therefore, the gait patterns can be obtained from the information of both side accelerometer and gyroscope. The gait pattern is also shown in smartphone through wireless techniques. This device can be used to evaluate the rehabilitation outcome and as biofeedback training for stroke patients. The system was tested when normal subject was asked to walk straight in comfortable or self-selected walking speed, but the stride length was limited to 1.2 m. The results indicated stride length closed to 1.2 m. And the symmetry ratio of various spatiotemporal parameters between both feet is around 1.0 which means normal.