Development of Measuring Walkway for Temporal and Distance Factors of Gait and Its Clinical Application

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The research achievements supported on Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) are mainly on the following three subjects.(1) IMPROVEMENT OF THE PROTOTYPAL WALKWAY SYSTEMIn order to enhance the computational ability and the memory capacity, the computer for this system was changed to the upper level one. In consideration of durability and maintenance ability of the system, the electric circuits were assembled mostly with printed boards and cables were changed to shielded ones.(2) GAIT MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS THROUGH THE IMPROVED SYSTEMMaking the most of this system, some gait analysises were performed. First, walking patterns of free and under several kinds of constraint of 92 normal adults were analyzed and assessed based upon the statistics. Secondly, the gaits of normal 109 5-year-old children were studied and compared with those of adults. The development of the gait patterns according to the child's age was analyzed with respect to 75 children aged 1 to 6. Thirdly the pathological gaits of 11 cerebral palsy (C.P.) children were studied.(3) EXPLOITATION AND APPLICATION OF BIOFEEDBACK GAIT TRAINING SYSTEMWe have developed a biofeedback gait training system, which is composed of the above mentioned measuring walkway and a training walker. The distance factors are indicated on the CRT and the desired temporal factors are indicated by the tone of the buzzer sound. The adventage of this system is that it can deal with the gait problems of all subjects in any phase of rehabilitation: measurement, analysis, training, ana/or evaluation. Experimental studies were performed on patients with degenerative knee joints and resulted that the biofeedback training improved pathological gaits markedly.