Gait Rehabilitation for Neurological Conditions using Wearable Devices

Many people with neurological conditions such as stroke, brain injury or multiple sclerosis suffer from an impaired walking gait pattern. Gait improvement can lead to better fluidity in walking, improved health outcomes, greater independence, and enhanced quality of life. Existing lab-based studies with wearable haptic devices have shown that rhythmic haptic cueing can cause immediate improvements to gait features such as temporal symmetry, stride length and walking speed. However, such wearable haptic devices are unsuitable for self-managed use, and to move this approach from out of the lab into the wild, numerous design challenges need to be addressed. We are designing, developing, and testing a system to provide haptic rhythmic cues for sustainable self-managed long-term use outside the lab by survivors of stroke, and other neurological conditions, in their everyday lives.