Body Weight Support Assisted Virtual Reality based Treadmill Walk with Gait Characterization

Healthy community living is adversely affected with post-stroke gait disorder. Patients are referred to gait rehabilitation. Often, clinician characterizes their gait using observation-based techniques. Though powerful, this suffers from subjectivity, resource limitations, etc. In rehabilitation, patients undergo over-ground and treadmill-based exercises. Treadmills augmented with cameras can quantify one's gait and offer rehabilitation. However, camera-based techniques are costly, lack portability, etc. Again, to ensure safety and unweighing (by varying degrees), treadmill-based setups are coupled with body weight support (BWS). Often this comes with Virtual Reality (VR)-based audio-visual motivational feedback. Here, we have designed BWS-assisted VR-enabled treadmill-based gait exercise platform. Additionally, we have used instrumented shoes to measure gait-related parameters e.g., stance and swing phases, symmetry index, etc. The results of a study with seven healthy and two post-stroke participants indicate the feasibility of the platform to have implications on gait and potential to contribute to post-stroke gait rehabilitation.