Using Distributed Wearable Inertial Sensors to Measure and Evaluate the Motions of Children with Cerebral Palsy in Hippotherapy

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a group of nonprogressive neuro-developmental conditions occurring in early childhood that causes movement disorders and physical disability. Measuring activity levels and gait patterns is an important aspect of rehabilitation programs for CP. Hippotherapy is a rehabilitation method to improve motor coordination ability of children with CP. However, there is still no practical evidence for the effectiveness of hippotherapy. This paper introduces a method of motor measurement and evaluation for children with CP based on body area sensor network. Our method uses wearable inertial sensors to measure the motor function of children with CP by sensor fusion algorithm, whose accuracy is verified by optical system. In addition, via introducing the control group, the differences of motor coordination ability and gait parameters between CP and healthy children were discussed. Generally speaking, our method can effectively measure the movement posture and gait parameters of children with CP during hippotherapy, which provides a basis for proving the effectiveness of hippotherapy.