Abstract
Ability to walk is one of the most important mobility in one's daily living. How to rebuild and improve patient's ability to walk has long been a major clinical research focus. Clinical assessments of patients' ability to walk are mainly depend on gait analysis system to provide kinematics and kinetics information of gait. However, commercial gait analysis systems are often too costly so most of the clinical bureaus are not equipped. Furthermore, most of the gait analysis instruments are restricted to fixed locations. This causes the system unable to handle particular patients with extreme short step length or patients who rely on assistant equipment to walk. This type of system is also incapable of carrying out long term gait analysis. According to clinical and practical needs of gait assessment, this study is to develop an affordable and portable gait analysis system to provide clinical gait assessment of particular patients. The proposed system is designed so that users can easily expand system hardware and software according to their practical needs. This study will first utilize piezoelectric film to develop force sensors, and then use these sensors to make instrumented shoes for ground-reaction measurement. The instrument shoes will be connected to a portable data logger for data collection. The collected ground-reaction information will then be processed by developed software so as to provide valuable gait parameters. After the accomplishment of gait analysis system, the system will be tested and evaluated at the Rehabilitation Clinics of Cheng-Gung Memorial Hospital.