An Intelligent System for Automatic Footdrop Correction in Stroke Patients using FES: A Pilot Study

Initial post-stroke hemiparesis is common in stroke patients that might lead to motor impairments of the contralateral limbs. They usually are presented with impaired ankle-foot function, commonly termed as footdrop / dropfoot. Their gait is associated with foot slap, toe-drag and hip-circumduction. Despite the research in post-stroke rehabilitation that has brought in various technical insights to footdrop correction, there is still want of evidence-based rehabilitation guidelines because of limited understanding of the mechanisms leading to footdrop and its correction. This paper presents a study with main objectives being 1) to develop a low-cost inertial motion sensor-based footdrop correction system that uses Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) as intervention, and to assess the effectiveness of the system in correcting footdrop with manual stimulation using a press button, and 2) propose an algorithm based on the above results to automate the stimulation timing of the device. Six healthy subjects and two stroke survivors were recruited for the study. Studies related to FES-based footdrop correction has always presented problems pertaining to an efficient way of achieving a normal gait. There are lesser evidences on the parameters of stimulation including the timing of stimulation which is a prime factor to achieve a smooth normal gait pattern which this study has taken into consideration. The results of this study show that such a device is expected to help stroke survivors with footdrop to walk with enough clearance. The tibial tilt angle, tibial angular velocity and forefoot normal acceleration components have been used to simulate the automatic stimulation ON/OFF pulse and the algorithm is found to work for the controls recruited, which proves the feasibility of automating the stimulation using sensor-based swing phase detection. The positive feedback about the device has also shown a direction towards the future work this work demands to completely automate the system and make a reliable, low-cost, user friendly footdrop correction device.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  International journal of scientific engineering and research

• Publication date

  2019-04-25

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.14299/IJSER.2019.04.10
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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