The effect of an auxiliary stimulation on motor function restoration by FES.

Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is a technology to generate neural activity in an artificial way to activate muscles. However, as reported by some researchers, the human responses to FES are likely to be affected by several factors, such as spasticity, muscle fatigue, nerve habituation and so forth. Consequently, the function restoration by FES is neither durable, nor stable. In order to realize long-term and stable FES assistance, this study investigated whether and why an Auxiliary Stimulation (AS) to the Gastrocnemius, with current frequency ranged from 2000 to 6000 Hz, could alleviate the symptom of spasticity and muscle fatigue caused by the stimulation to the Tibialis Anterior. We have developed a portable auxiliary stimulator, and performed experiments to verify its effectiveness. The results showed that our approach enabled comparatively stable and durable function restoration assistance. Moreover, for understanding underlying neuromuscular processes elicited by the AS and its qualitative nature, this study also measured the Hoffmann-reflex (H-reflex) in soleus muscle before and after the AS, to interpret the effect of the Auxiliary Stimulation.

Probabilistic information structure of human walking.

Recently, the area of healthcare has been tremendously benefited from the advent of high performance computing in improving quality of life. Different processing techniques have been developed to understand the hidden complexity of the time series and will help clinicians in diagnosis and treatment. Analysis of human walking helps to study the various pathological conditions affecting balance and the elderly. In an elderly subjects, falls and paralysis are major problems, in terms of both frequency and consequences. Correct postural balance is important to well being and its effects will be felt in every movement and activity. In this paper, Bayesian Network (BN) was applied to recorded muscle activities and joint motions during walking, to extract causal information structure of normal walking and different impaired walking. The aim of this study is to use different BNs to express normal walking and various impaired walking, and identify the most important causal pairs that characterize specific impaired walking, through comparing the BNs for different walking.