Artificial gait pattern to be applied on human locomotor rehabilitation

Recent studies suggest that training of gait on treadmill can improve functional mobility of patients with spinal cord injury. Traditionally this therapy involves the participation of two people who move the lower limbs of the patient trying to simulate the normal trajectories of body segments to avoid or reduce muscular atrophy and improve mobility. The present work proposes a novel artificial gait pattern application through a bilateral orthosis for training and rehabilitation purposes. The proposed solution is based on pneumatic actuators, a bilateral gait orthosis, a set of clectropneumatic elements and a control program developed on a platform of an electronic microcontroller. As a design strategy, the goal was to obtain an artificial pattern of gait, functionally useful, with a minimum number of actuators and a duty period as reduced as possible, in order to use in rehabiIitation programs of patients with neuromuscular disorders, Kinematics and teniporal gait data acquired from 7 healthy subjects were used for design the artificial gait pattern. The proposed pattern of artificial gait contemplates the movements in sagittal plane OC hip and knee joints. Experiments with two healthy subjects were carried out in order to evaluate the artificial gait pattern. The results show that hip and knee kinematic curves obtained with the artificial gait pattern are simiiar to kinematics of normal gait.