Gait Measurement System Toward Robotic Rehabilitation of Locomotive Functions

The extension of health expectancy is getting a more important subject for developed countries with higher rate of elderly population. In order to sustain their societies, aged people are encouraged to participate in the social activities, while the social participation requires them to keep their locomotive function high enough to accomplish their missions. From this reason, the easy and frequent assessment of the locomotive function thought the people's daily lives is strongly expected. One of the promising methods to evaluate locomotive function is the Timed Up and Go test (TUG test), which is a widely used method in the field of physical therapy for locomotive rehabilitation in medical facilities. Throughout our research activities, we have been investigating robotic approaches to assess cognitive and motor functions of aged people in the purpose of their health expectancy extension. In this article, we will propose a novel method of a gait measurement system that will be incorporated with health care mobile robots developed previously. We demonstrated experiments to measure the walking patterns of 23 subjects of aged people in order to evaluate their locomotive functions using the proposed gait measurement system.