Pelvic support mechanism for training dynamic balancing and turning during treadmill-based walking: A pilot study

Abstract

Walking is an important human activity of daily living. Turning during walking represents up to a half of the time of all walking activities, where humans use different skills and muscle coordination as compared to the straight walking. This contribution presents a system for training dynamic balancing and turning during treadmill-based walking, which includes pelvic support mechanism with passive 6 DoFs parallel mechanism that embraces pelvis and supports the subject. For this system, three training modes with different difficulty levels were developed in order to establish suitable training conditions. In addition, the virtual scene was programmed that visualizes the walking path during training. To test all three training modes and compare biomechanical signals of pelvic rotations/translations during walking on the treadmill that can rotate around its vertical axis, one subject participated in this initial experiment. The results show that the pelvic movements are highly correlated with the treadmill rotations around the vertical axis. The proposed system for training dynamic balancing and turning during treadmill-based walking with the pelvic support mechanism, supported by the different training modes and different virtual scenes may be a promising device to recover the function of walking and balance after neurological injury.