Emulation of hill walking and turning on Balance Assessment Robot: A preliminary study

Gait training after stroke is often associated with rehabilitation robotics and virtual environment in order to simulate practice of different functional gait tasks. Changing direction, walking up and down the slope are important skills that need to be practiced. The aim of this preliminary study was to compare inclined treadmill walking and turning conditions with its emulations on a recently developed Balance Assessment Robot for Treadmill walking (BART) on a basis of ground reaction forces (GRF) and lower extremity electromyography (EMG). First, a healthy participant walked overground straight, turning to left and right direction at a predefined walking speed and radius, and walking uphill and downhill on a sloped BART. After that, the participant walked with the proposed and integrated emulation strategies on BART, designed to induce hill walking and turning in human locomotion behaviour. The results of hill walking emulation show high similarities with the inclined treadmill walking, while turning emulation show high similarities when comparing GRF data and some similarities to the overground turning behaviour when comparing EMG data. Further studies on a group of subjects should compare inclined treadmill walking and turning with proposed emulation in order to investigate feasibility of the proposed approach in rehabilitation.