Wearables for Long Term Gait Rehabilitation of Neurological Conditions

Many people with long-term neurological and neurodegenerative conditions such as stroke, brain injury, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease 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 devices have shown that rhythmic haptic cueing can cause immediate improvements to gait features such as temporal symmetry, stride length and walking speed. However, current wearable systems are unsuitable for self-managed use, and to move this approach from out of the lab into long-term sustained usage, numerous design challenges need to be addressed. We are designing, developing, and testing a closed-loop system to provide adaptive 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.