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Towards artificial sensory feedback for lower-limb amputees : how does a vibrotactile stimulation of the patellar tendon influence the gait pattern of able-bodied subjects ?

Otlet, Virginie
(2019)

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Details

Supervisors
Ronsse, Renaud
Faculty
Ecole polytechnique de Louvain
Degree label
Master [120] : ingénieur civil biomédical
Abstract
Context The number of amputations continues to increase due to the ageing population and its associated increase in diabetes. Approximately 85% of these amputations are those of the lower-limb. The lack of sensory feedback provided by existing lower-limb prostheses, in addition to the loss of motor functions, leads to abnormal gait kinematics which cause a lot of additional medical conditions and high risk of falling. A lot of studies have been performed in the past twenty years to increase knowledge in this field. Objective The goal of this thesis is twofold: to investigate the effects of an artificial sensory feedback on the gait pattern of able-bodied subjects, and to study the effects of a perturbation introduced into this feedback on the gait pattern of these subjects. This thesis is part of the long term objective to develop a lower-limb prosthesis delivering artificial sensory feedback to the user. Experiments A vibrotactile stimulation is applied at the patellar tendon of the knee with three different conditions: at the maximum knee flexion, 5% of the gait cycle before this event and 5% of the gait cycle after this event. The control condition corresponds to the case where there is no stimulation applied. Results The statistical analysis shows that there is no effect of the different stimulation conditions on temporal parameters, like the stride durations and the phase leads between legs. In contrast, they have an effect on spatial parameters. Indeed, the amplitudes of the shank angular velocity and vertical acceleration signals are higher for the condition where there is no stimulation applied than the one where the stimulation is applied at the maximum knee flexion. Surprisingly, there is no significant effect of both conditions where the stimulation is applied with an offset.