Conception of Assistive Equipment for Rehabilitation of Patients with Spinal Cord Injury

Mobility is the urgent requisite of post spinal cord injury (SCI) patient. Since the alternative and compensatory approach is considered as the major function of mobility assistive device for post-SCI patients, the device should possess capability to acclimate to the ‘abnormal’ gait generate by the patients who usually undergo alternative and compensatory rehabilitation in their neural circuit. The functional ability of individual should be taking into account. Yet according to the requirement of neuro-protective treatment in post-SCI rehabilitation processing, locomotor-like activity is still an essential factor to patient. This study presents a novel concept and prototype of assistive technology base on foot control strategy to take an equilibrium between mobility and gait realization. To demonstrate that foot-induced over-ground locomotor assistive method is capable of achieving locomotor-like activity (dragging step), simulation analysis and prototype preliminary experiment have been conducted. Simulation analysis show that foot-induced assistance can allow more volitional activity compare to the hip-knee-induced assistive device. Yet the input and disturbance act on such kind of device may be increased. Surface electromyography (sEMG) from muscles of lower limb (right rectus femoris, right biceps femoris and right gluteus maximus) have been recorded during the preliminary experiment, and the mean of integrated EMG (iEMG) was used as evaluation of muscle activity. The result of the testing show that the mean of iEMG in the right gluteus maximus was reduced in the swing phase when the subject moving ahead with the prototype, but no significant change in the right rectus femoris. It may imply that foot-induced over-ground locomotor assistive device can reduce the muscle activity when patient complete locomotor-like movement and retain some amount of residual recruitment of lower limb, instead of substituting arbitrarily.