A Research Protocol to Evaluate Wearable Robotics for Gait Rehabilitation Combined with Transcutaneous Spinal Cord Stimulation
摘要
Portable exoskeletons for gait rehabilitation have gained increasing interest as a tool for gait rehabilitation after neurological injuries. They are being combined with other systems such as transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) to add up their advantages, as well as with neural-machine interfaces (NMI) to control the device based on users’ intention, but the advantages of robotic-assisted over traditional rehabilitation is still poorly demonstrated. We present a research protocol to understand the biomechanical and neurological effects of robot-assisted gait rehabilitation in kinematics, spatiotemporal, physiological, and kinetic dimensions. Our methodology is designed to be implemented in a realistic rehabilitation scenario with subjects with neurological injuries using common assessment systems, hence, it can be used by other centers to gather comparable data and increase the information available related to the effect of using gait rehabilitation robotics and other technologies.