A bipedal gait locomotion model for simulating hemiplegic behavior

Application of gait modeling in analysis of pathological behavior is an important subject in rehabilitation of neural disorders. Different simulations are conducted for imitating pathological manners of these patients that biomechanical abnormality was investigated more in details. Besides, in some injuries, e.g. stroke, abnormal behaviors caused majorly by the brain signal disruption than the biomechanical effects. However, this issue has been less explored so far. Thus, in this paper a neuromechanical model of biped locomotion is proposed where the stroke effect is explicitly considered in brain signal disruption. In the model, two separate central pattern generators (CPGs) are incorporated for controlling each leg that each one is triggered individually by the excitatory brain signal. Accordingly, a stroke condition is imitated by inserting a malfunction into the triggering brain signals of one CPG. This disrupts the function of neuromuscular controlling system of one side that occurs routinely in hemiplegia. The malfunction is an amplifying gain that simulates brain signal enlargement after a stroke.