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Activity display for older adults living with foot drop
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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With the rapid development speed of social and economic change, people are paying more and more attention to the health of themselves and their families. As a result, there is an increasing demand for health and rehabilitation services and technologies. Currently, the number of people living with foot drop caused by stroke is vast. These people have difficulties while walking, their quality of life is greatly affected due to foot drop disorders. How to make such people with foot drop to walk more steadily with the help of assistive devices to adapt to their daily lives while gradually getting rehabilitated is one of the focuses of compensation strategies in the field of rehabilitation.
This thesis proposes a compensate method for older adults living with foot drop to walk or even jog more steadily. Currently, there already exist many kinds of foot drop assistive devices. In this thesis project, orthotics, stimulators, and smart shoes are used to match up with my application design - the WalkingGuardian. For orthotics, Dynamic Ankle Foot Orthosis (DAFO) is designed to help a person maintain a functional position as well as improve stability for successful standing and walking. For stimulators, Dropped Foot Stimulator (DFS) can stimulate nerves to correct muscles to respond and form better circulation. For smart shoes, existing smart insoles can already collect a variety of foot data associated with foot drop condition and transmitted all the data to the smart phone immediately. Therefore, when the WalkingGuardian becomes the control center to integrate all the devices together into a system, individuals can select the most appropriate way to incorporate activities into daily lives not only achieve the purpose of rehabilitation but also improve their own physiological functions, facilitate the diagnosis and treatment, which can boosting efficiency and slashing costs. The WalkingGuardian is the operating system to control all the functions and gather all the information. All the physical data and using data are recorded in the application for analysis.
Nine older adults living with foot drop participated in the evaluation of the WalkingGuardian. Feedbacks were collected to determine the acceptability of the functions and the concepts. Suggestions for improving the concept and future research are recommended.
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- Date created
- 2018-09-24
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- Type of Item
- Research Material