The aim of gait rehabilitation is a restoration of an independent gait and improvement of daily life walking functions. Therefore the specific patterns, that are to be relearned, must be practiced to stimulate the learning process of the central nervous system (CNS). The Walking Simulator HapticWalker allows for the training of arbitrary gait trajectories of daily life. To evaluate the quality of the training a total of 9 subjects were investigated during free floor walking and stair climbing and during the same tasks in two different training modes on the HapticWalker: 1) with and 2) without vertical center of mass (CoM) motion. Electromyograms (EMG) of 8 gait relevant muscles were measured and muscle activation was compared for the various training modes. Besides the muscle activation as an indicator for the quality of rehabilitation training the study investigates if a cancellation of the vertical CoM movement by adaption of the footplate trajectory is feasible i.e. the muscle activation patterns for the two training modes on the HapticWalker agree. Results show no significant differences in activation timing between the training modes. This indicates the feasibility of using a passive patient suspension and emulate the vertical CoM motion by trajectory adaption of the footplates. The muscle activation timing during HapticWalker training shows important characteristics observed in physiological free walking though a few differences can still remain.

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The seven articles in this special section focus on rehabilitation via bio-cooperative control. In this special section, the idea of bio-cooperative control has been applied to different kinds of rehabilitation devices (e.g., exoskeletal robots, end-effector robots, wheelchairs) used for the training of gait or arm movements or for the assessment of entire body activity of healthy subjects and patients with stroke or other neurological disorders.

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I pazienti paraplegici, a causa di una lesione completa del midollo spinale, perdono le afferenze per il controllo motorio e sensitivo della parte inferiore del corpo: i comandi provenienti dalle zone di controllo motorio del cervello non giungono a destinazione e, quindi, i muscoli, pur ancora innervati, non possono essere contratti se le radici motorie di questi ultimi sono ad un livello inferiore rispetto a quello della lesione midollare. Una delle conseguenze è la paralisi degli arti inferiori. In Italia si stima vi siano, ogni anno, circa 1.800 nuovi casi (in prevalenza conseguenza di traumi derivanti da incidenti stradali e da infortuni sul lavoro) ed una popolazione complessiva di circa 80.000 paraplegici.

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This paper focuses upon the research of using the haptic devices. Due to the bi-directional human-device communication, there has been much ambiguity in describing and evaluating these interfaces. The goal of this paper is to present the main characteristics of the haptic devices used for medical and engineering applications. The previous work in virtual reality of our department and an efficient original method for modeling human teeth using a haptic device and a Head Mounted Device are presented.

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