A Study on Sound Feedback in a Virtual Environment for Gait Rehabilitation

For the rehabilitation of stroke and spinal cord injured patients, actuated gait orthoses are used to automate treadmill training. To increase motivation and provide task-specific feedback for these patients, virtual environments are developed and evaluated by many research groups. This paper describes the design, implementation and preliminary evaluation of sound feedback strategies for the actuated gait orthosis LOKOMAT. In the context of an obstacle scenario, the scenario parameters distance and foot height are displayed by sound. An evaluation study with 17 healthy subjects compared no sound feedback (control condition), distance feedback, height feedback, and combined feedback. Visual feedback was present in all conditions. Results indicate that subjects walk faster and hit fewer obstacles when acoustic feedback is present. The findings suggest that acoustic feedback is helpful as a complementary modality and can be applied to a variety of virtual, task-oriented rehabilitation environments.