The purpose of this work is to give a first asses-sment about the efiectiveness of a new automated treadmill training for paraplegic patients using a driven gait orthosis (DGO). Manually assisted walking on a treadmill combined with body weight support has been used for more than 10 years in the locomotor rehabilitation of paraplegic patients. It could be shown that in incomplete spinal cord injured patients (SCI) this training improves walking capabilities.1,2 Up to now the assistance of the leg movements usually required at an early stage of training was done by physio-therapists. This manual assistance of the patient’s legs can be exhaustive because it has to be carried out in an ergonomically unfavorable position. Therefore the DGO has been developed to allow an automated moving of the legs of non-ambulatory patients during locomotor training on the treadmill. The goal of this endeavor was to facilitate the work of the therapists, to prolong the duration of the training sessions and to achieve a reproducible gait pattern for the leg movements. The aim of this study was to show how far the manually assisted locomotor training can be replaced by the automated one. This was done by com-paring the leg muscles EMG activity of two patients while they were trained either with the manual or the automated training method.

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