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Emily Upton
BioE M.S. Defense
April 11th, 2022
9:00 AM
Location: GTMI Auditorium (Room 101)
Committee:
Aaron Young, Ph.D. (Advisor) (School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Gregory Sawicki, Ph.D. (School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Trisha Kesar, Ph.D. (Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine)
Exoskeleton Assistance with Vibrotactile and Auditory Biofeedback for Post-Stroke Gait Retraining
Stroke is the leading cause of disability in America with 80% of post-stroke individuals left with gait impairments. Rehabilitation post-stroke is very important to encourage, retrain, and assist proper gait mechanics. Usually, post-stroke gait is highly asymmetric between the affected and non-affected limbs. Due to hemiplegia on the affected limb, a smaller ankle moment causes reduced propulsion and slower walking speed. Using various rehabilitation strategies (including exoskeletons and biofeedback), these deficits can be reduced, and gait can be improved. It is unknown how the combination of biofeedback and exoskeleton assistance changes the kinematic, kinetic, and spatiotemporal outcomes of post-stroke individuals. In this thesis, a biofeedback system was created to measure the trailing limb angle in real-time and provide vibrotactile and auditory biofeedback to the user. By targeting the trailing limb angle, propulsion and walking speed can be improved. Experiments were performed to analyze the effects of an ankle exoskeleton and hip exoskeleton with and without biofeedback on post-stroke individuals. This was done to determine whether the combination of exoskeleton assistance and biofeedback improves propulsion and walking speed more than the paradigms alone and when compared to baseline. This thesis covers the design of the biofeedback system, the experimental procedures performed, and analysis of the results of each experiment.
