Purpose.  To investigate the effects of dynamic ankle-foot orthoses (DAFOs) on functional ambulation activities, weight bearing and spatio-temporal characteristics of hemiparetic gait and to inquire whether wearing a DAFO for 3 months has a carryover effect.

Method. Fourteen chronic hemiparetic patients who could walk independently with or without a cane were the subjects of the study. Patients were assessed initially with tennis shoes and were given custom fabricated DAFOs which they wore for three months and were retested under two conditions: with tennis shoes only and with DAFOs worn in these shoes. All patients were assessed for weight bearing percentage of the affected side, cadence, step length of the involved and uninvolved sides, step width, functional reach, timed up and go, timed down stairs, timed up stairs, physiologic cost index and velocity.

Results. Comparison of initial and third month assessments with shoes only condition showed that there was no significant improvement for the measured parameters. When comparison was made at the third month while patients were wearing tennis shoes only and when they were wearing DAFO’s in their shoes there was a significant difference in favour of the condition where patients were wearing DAFOs.

Conclusion. The benefits of using DAFOs in chronic hemiparetic patients are lost when the patients are not wearing their orthoses.

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Patients with neurological disorders, such as stroke survivors, can be treated with physical rehabilitation to regain motor control and function. Conventional therapy techniques are labor intensive and non-standardized. This is especially true in gait rehabilitation. A natural and tunable rehabilitation gait system (NaTUre_gaits) has been developed to assist gait rehabilitation with body-weight support locomotion training (BWSLT), gait control (GC), balance control (BC) and pelvic control (PC). All of those components are attached to a mobile platform (MP) with a total weight of more than 200kg. In order to coordinate the system with the motion of GC/BC/PC and to provide BWS for the subject throughout the walking test, the mobile system needs to move adaptively and steadily against those dynamic disturbance and heavy load. Motivated by reducing the tuning time, an identification and control method are proposed. Based on the relay response during operation, the system model is obtained and then PD controller with feed forward feedback is designed. Trials with/without subject are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and merit of the proposed modeling and tuning method.

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