A Mobile Gait Monitoring System for Abnormal Gait Diagnosis and Rehabilitation: A Pilot Study for Parkinson Disease Patients

Abstract

Conventional gait rehabilitation treatment does not provide quantitative information on abnormal gait kinematics, and the match of the intervention strategy to the underlying clinical presentation may be limited by clinical expertise and experience. Also the effect of rehabilitation treatment may be reduced as the rehabilitation treatment is achieved only in a clinical setting. In this paper, a mobile gait monitoring system (MGMS) is proposed for the diagnosis of abnormal gait and rehabilitation. The proposed MGMS consists of Smart Shoes and a microsignal processor with a touch screen display. It monitors patients' gait by observing the ground reaction force (GRF) and the center of GRF, and analyzes the gait abnormality. Since visual feedback about patients' GRFs and normal GRF patterns are provided by the MGMS, patients can practice the rehabilitation treatment by trying to follow the normal GRF patterns without restriction of time and place. The gait abnormality proposed in this paper is defined by the deviation between the patient's GRFs and normal GRF patterns, which are constructed as GRF bands. The effectiveness of the proposed gait analysis methods with the MGMS has been verified by preliminary trials with patients suffering from gait disorders.