A robotic treadmill system to mimic overground walking training with body weight support.

INTRODUCTION: Body weight support overground walking training (BWSOWT) is widely used in gait rehabilitation. However, existing systems require large workspace, complex structure, and substantial installation cost for the actuator, which make those systems inappropriate for the clinical environment. For wide clinical use, the proposed system is based on a self-paced treadmill, and uses an optimized body weight support with frame-based two-wire mechanism.

METHOD: The Interactive treadmill was used to mimic overground walking. We opted the conventional DC motors to partially unload the body weight and modified pelvic type harness to allow natural pelvic motion. The performance of the proposed system on the measurement of anterior/posterior position, force control, and pelvic motion was evaluated with 8 healthy subjects during walking training.

RESULTS: We verified that the proposed system was the cost/space-effective and showed the more accurate anterior/posterior position than motion sensor, comparable force control performance, and natural pelvic motion.

DISCUSSION: The proposed system is cost/space effective, and able to mimic overground walking training with body weight support. In future work, we will improve the force control performance and optimize the training protocol for wide clinical use.