Design of a Walking Assistive Robot Against Festination and Freezing of Gait

Festination and freezing are typical and episodic gait disturbances of Parkinsonism, which constrain the life participation of patients. Gait training can reduce festination and freezing episodes by gait correction based on feedback and cueing-based walking. However, the training is normally restricted in clinical environment and it is tedious and labor-consuming for the therapists. To conduct in-home rehabilitation, safe solutions with feedback and cues rendering in real time to replace the therapists during training are expected. This paper describes a design of a walking assistive robot, which not only can give interactive feedback based on the abnormal gait detection, but also can display visual cues to activate the motions against freezing. With the safe construction design and the interactive training application, the robot can be used in home treatment. The functional performance of robot are verified. The experimental results show that the robot is able to correctly provide cues and feedback with respect to gait events and help against festination and freezing of gait.