JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Rhythm, brain and the body are closely linked. Humans can synchronise their movement to auditory rhythms with little apparent effort. However, the ability to perform rhythmic movement can be severely disrupted due to neurological conditions. Even in cases where the ability to perceive rhythms remain, a neurological condition may affect the mechanisms controlling the muscles during movement. Having the gait rhythm disrupted brings severe asymmetries between steps, which lead to numerous physical problems – ranging from muscle degeneration to bone fractures – accentuating the patient’s condition. This paper focuses on people who have survived a stroke and are now suffering from hemiparesis – a neurological conditions affecting one side of the body unilaterally. Movement synchronisation via entrainment to auditory metronomes is known to improve gait; this paper presents the first systematic study of entrainment for gait rehabilitation via the haptic modality.

Objective:

This paper explores the gait rehabilitation of people with hemiparesis following a stroke or brain injury, by a process of haptic entrainment to rhythmic cues.

Methods:

The study presented here is a quantitative gait study combining temporal and spatial data on haptically cued participants with hemiparetic stroke and brain injury. Gait characteristics were measured before, during, and after cueing.

Results:

All eleven successfully screened participants were able to synchronise their steps to a haptically presented rhythm. Specifically, six participants demonstrated immediate improvements regarding their temporal gait characteristics, and three out of six improved their gait in terms of spatial characteristics.

Conclusions:

Given the great variability of stroke survivors and the limited number of available participants, there is no claim here of statistical evidence able to support a formal experimental result of improved gait. However, considering this great variability of participants, and viewing the empirical gait investigation as a set of eleven case studies, more modest empirical claims can be made. At a case study level, immediate improvements were seen in the temporal gait data of six out of eleven participants.