Longitudinal Monitoring of Full-Course Gait Rehabilitation using Musculoskeletal Modeling and Muscle Coordination Analysis

Muscle coordination pattern can be disrupted by neural disorders and perceptual disturbance, leading to abnormal gaits. However, it is still unclear how neuro-muscular control regulates walking gaits through training and exercising due to lengthy rehabilitation periods and complicated musculoskeletal redundancies. This paper proposes a gait rehabilitation monitoring method based on muscle deformation to elucidate the evolution of muscle coordination during the full-course vertigo-gait rehabilitation. The proposed method is verified by musculoskeletal dynamics simulation and experimentally validated through immediate applications to five healthy subjects and five vertigo patients. The vertigo gaits were assessed by comparing with the normal gait of healthy subjects. For the first time, this paper reports experimental results and muscle coordination analysis throughout the full course of vertigo-gait rehabilitation. The findings reveal that the vertigo patient adjusts phase difference between the rectus femoris (RF) and medial gastrocnemius (MG) at toe-off, driving the knee and ankle joints to regulate foot-to-ground angle, thereby enhancing gait stability and walking efficiency. These results indicate that muscle deformations serve as an alternative quantity besides traditionally employed kinematic features, and the proposed wearable sensing method is expected to provide an effective tool for clinical gait assessment.