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Adapting spatiotemporal gait symmetry to electrical stimulation during treadmill walking

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Apr 01, 2024 version files 62.31 KB

Abstract

Individuals with neurological impairments often exhibit asymmetrical gait patterns. This study highlighted the potential of functional electrical stimulation (FES) to improve gait symmetry during treadmill training and investigated whether our proposed FES perturbation paradigm could induce gait adaptation concerning spatial and temporal gait symmetry in healthy subjects. In the FES perturbation paradigm, both legs received electrical pulses at the same period as the subjects’ initial stride duration, and the temporal gap between the two pulses for each leg was manipulated over 7 minutes. Following this, subjects continued to walk for another 5 minutes without FES. For the implicit trial (unconscious reaction to FES), subjects were asked to walk comfortably in response to the stimulation. For the explicit trial (conscious reaction to FES), subjects were asked to explicitly synchronize their toe-off phase to the stimulation. To examine the effects of the FES perturbation, we measured step length and stance time and then analyzed changes in step length and stance time symmetries alongside their subsequent aftereffects. In this study, regardless of whether subjects adapted their gait patterns to the electrical pulses explicitly or implicitly, a directional change was observed in stance time (temporal) symmetry under both conditions, with the right stance becoming longer than the left. The stance time asymmetry induced by FES perturbation resulted in a slight residual effect. No consistent trend of step length (spatial) symmetry changes was observed in either condition. This indicates that subjects may adapt their spatial gait patterns through diverse mechanisms. Our findings suggest that the applied FES perturbation strategy can induce adaptations in subjects’ temporal gait asymmetry, particularly while in stance. Further experiments would provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism behind subjects’ response to FES perturbations, as well as the long-term effects of these perturbations on the spatial and temporal aspects of gait symmetry.