Development of gait training system by real-time audio-visual feedback of the ground reaction force in walking

In gait training for walking rehabilitation, it is essential to maintain a good balance during walking (i.e., both legs equally loaded). Therefore, scales are frequently used in order to feed back the load of the lower limbs to the trainee. However, in this situation, the trainee has to look down to check whether the scale and the trainee’s walking posture is affected in an undesirable manner. In addition, the trainee generally cannot read the load value accurately.

In this study, we propose a gait training system with a real-time audiovisual feedback function for each leg’s load. For this system, the feedback of the lower limb load is calculated from the ground reaction force, allowing the trainee to use audio and visual information in real time.