The Effectiveness of Exoskeleton Type Robotic Gait Training Using CIMT for Lower Extremity: in the Aspect of Gait Independence and Balance

In the researchers' words

The prevalence of stroke has reached 795,000 a year worldwide, which cannot be overlooked. In stroke patients, gait disorder is the most common among the complications of stroke, which is known to have the greatest adverse effect. One of the important goals of rehabilitation after a stroke is the restoration of symmetry and balance of locomotion to prevent complications such as fall. Meanwhile, various methods have been devised in addition to the conventional physical therapy using physical efforts of a physical therapist as a rehabilitation treatment designed to improve gait exercise capacity including body weight-supported treadmill training, Hydrotherapy and robot-assisted gait training. Especially in the case of robot-assisted gait training, it is proven to be more effective in terms of gait function recovery compared to the patient group who only undergoes conventional physical therapy. Robot-assisted gait training can be divided into two types according to the driven principle, exoskeleton-type robot assisted gait training and end-effector gait training. Among them, exoskeleton-type robotic gait training has distinctive feature from another type, the guidance force, which assists the movement of the lower extremities throughout the entire gait cycle according to a pre-set joint trajectory data based on healthy people. For patients who are currently unable to walk,…