Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 14, 2026
A Rehabilitation Program of Exoskeleton-assisted Body Weight-Supported Treadmill Training with Non-immersive Virtual Reality for Stroke Patients
Published on: May 16, 2025
Physical therapy during stroke rehabilitation for people with different walking abilities
Nancy K Latham1, Diane U Jette, Mary Slavin
1Health and Disability Research Institute, Boston University, Boston, MA 02446, USA. nlatham@bu.edu
Unlabelled:
Latham NK, Jette DU, Slavin M, Richards LG, Procino A, Smout RJ, Horn SD. Physical therapy during stroke rehabilitation for people with different walking abilities.
Objective:
To describe how physical therapy (PT) activities during post-stroke inpatient rehabilitation vary by admission walking ability and over time.
Design:
Observational cohort study.
Setting:
Six inpatient rehabilitation hospitals in the United States.
Participants:
People receiving post-stroke PT (N=715) who were classified as walking at admission.
Interventions:
Not applicable.
Main Outcome Measures:
Percentage of time spent in 11 activities, percentage of patients who participated in each activity, and the FIM instrument scores.
Results:
The majority of PT time was spent in gait activities. Even people with the most limited mobility spent 25% to 38% of PT time in gait activities during the first 6-hour treatment block. Treatment progression was evident, and a shift to more advanced activities occurred over time (eg, less bed mobility and more advanced gait). However, even in the final 6-hour block, a small proportion of time was spent on community mobility activities (1.2%-5.2%), and most people received no community mobility training.
Conclusions:
PT activities focused on specific functional tasks at the ability level of each individual patient and provided higher-level activities as patients improved their function. However, although there is increasing recognition that the environment influences task performance, little time was spent in community mobility activities before discharge.
