Embedded Files
TrueStep is a team of undergraduate engineering students at the University of Houston. As a part of our senior design project, we are working to develop a robotic assistive device which could assist patients with a foot drop condition. We were grateful to receive an educational scholarship from Phidgets Inc for our project. The TrueStep team is using Phidgets Inc's 1042_0B 3/3/3 Spatial to collect gait data when a person is performing walking motion. The Phidgets Spatial offers an easy data collection method. A Phidgets Control Panel can be installed on a computer which allows to view a graphical representation of the data simultaneously as it is being collected. It also allows an easy GUI platform to change the data collection parameters such as sampling interval. We plan to use the angular velocity gait data collected by Phidgets to create a motion control algorithm for our device.
As shown in figure 1, we used the Phidgets IMU sensor and placed it on the instep of their foot to measure the gait angular velocity using the inbuilt gyroscope. We collected the angular velocity of the foot twice; once with a normal gait and another by imitating a walking pattern of a person suffering from a foot drop. We saved the collected data on our computer in a .csv file using the Phidgets Control Panel.
Figure 1
By utilizing the MATLAB Programming tool, our team generated several graphs to analyze the walking patterns of a person with a foot drop. Figure 2 is a direct plot of the angular velocity data obtained from the Phidgets sensor at 200 Hz sampling rate for the foot drop walking pattern. Figure 3 is the angular velocity for a abled foot's walking pattern. As we can see there is a observable difference between the peak values for both the plots.
Figure 2
Figure 3
We then converted the angular velocity data into angular displacement data for each sample. As seen in figure 4, the maximum angular displacement for the drop foot measurement is around 14 degrees in the positive direction and 3 degrees in the negative direction. This is significantly lower than the angular displacement of the abled foot which is around 40 degrees in the positive direction and 18 degrees in the negative direction as seen in Figure 5. Our team plans to use these plots and data as a reference to develop a motion control for the device which would enable us to assist the foot of a foot drop patient in order to increase its angular displacement and aid them to walk.
Figure 4
Figure 5
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse