Development of gait phase analyzing devices for the gait training equipment for hemiplegia patients

This paper describes the design and development of gait phase analyzing devices which are key components consisting of the gait training equipment for hemiplegia patients. The devices should be durable against the friction of rotating rubber belt of the gait training equipment and robust to the mechanical vibration caused by the operation of the gait training equipment so that they can detect the gait phase accurately during training. We could develop the gait phase analyzing device that can satisfy these criteria by designing and implementing of two new devices, a magnet shoe and magnetic sensor array board. The magnet shoe has three rows of magnetic sensor array and each row has different number of permanent magnets so that which parts of the shoe are touched to the magnet sensor array board. In addition, the shoe was designed as an overshoe so that a patient can attach and detach the shoe easily. The magnet sensor array board has 1,620 magnetic sensors which are arranged in 30 rows and each row consists of 54 magnetic sensors where the distance between sensors is 2 cm in horizontal and vertical direction. The experiment results show that they have spatial resolution of 1 cm in horizontal and vertical directions and temporal resolution of 20 frames per second of the gait phase. The gait phase analyzing devices developed in this study were incorporated into the design of gait training equipment for hemiplegia patients and they showed feasibility in practical operating environment. They also can be applied to other similar equipment which needs the gait phase analysis function.