Review and classification of human gait training and rehabilitation devices

摘要

The number of people with reduced mobility capabilities increases every year.This reduction arises mainly due to spinal cord injuries; strokes which caused hemiparesis;or due to an advanced age. This decrease in mobility is a factor that influencesboth their quality of life and their dependence of others in daily life.Thus, it becomes necessary to find means and tools to prevent, compensate, improveor help to restore and increase the mobility of the affected people. The mainexpectation is that such means help to recover or ameliorate their independence intheir daily life. Traditional training employs a treadmill with a support-weight system.This training is based on the principle of repetition of all the physical movementsof a gait and has shown to produce good results in terms of rehabilitation ofpatients. However, this therapy requires two or more therapists in assisting patientsduring walking, to hold and adjust the patient’s lower limbs to correctly produce thedesired gait. Thus, it requires a substantial commitment and effort of the therapists[1], and it is very expensive in terms of human resources. This leads to a boost onthe population healthcare and assistive services demand and, thus an increase in theneed for care givers.Assistive mobility robotic devices for gait training of disabled patients in treadmillsand in the ground are one successful alternative. Other alternatives includedevices that allow a broader training of patients, in different ground types, and therepetition of gait movements in uphill, downhill and trip.This paper reviews state of the art training gait devices focusing on passive andactive devices. Passive devices rely on the principle of Gravity-Balancing in thatthey try to reduce or eliminate the effects of gravity during walking. Active devicesare usually classified according to three different approaches: (i) treadmillexoskeletonbased devices, (ii) robotic manipulators generating different types ofgait patterns, and (iii) mobilite devices. In this review, several examples of currentdevices are presented.