Title : The efficacy of powered gait orthoses on walking in persons with spinal cord injury: A literature review
Abstract:
Background: Powered gait orthoses are a new group of assistive devices used to rehabilitate people with spinal cord injuries. These orthoses create movement in the joints and lower limbs of spinal cord injury patients through external power caused by electric motors, pneumatic or hydraulic actuators.
Objective: Powered gait orthoses improve the kinetics, kinematics, and walking parameters in people with spinal cord injury by providing the movements of the lower limb joints through external power; It causes the reduction of compensatory and alternative movements in the upper limbs and trunk. This article reviews the effect of this group of orthoses on the walking of people with spinal cord injuries.
Study design: Literature review.
Method: A literature search was performed in ISI Web of Knowledge, PubMed, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, and Scopus databases.
Results: Powered gait orthoses have a beneficial effect on the kinetics, kinematics, and walking parameters of gait and are effective in creating active movements in lower limb joints, but their effect on the muscle activity and gait patterns of people with spinal cord injury is still unclear.
Conclusions: More research is needed in the field of power orthoses and their effect on lower limb muscle activity, ankle joint and walking patterns in people with spinal cord injuries.
Clinical relevance: Power gait orthoses, as a new generation of assistive devices, have an important effect on improving walking parameters, reducing energy consumption, and improving the performance of people with spinal cord injuries.
Keywords: Powered gait orthosis; paraplegia; spinal cord injury; gait; walking.
Audience Take Away Notes:
- Rehabilitation and helping people with spinal cord injury to stand and walk is very important, which takes a lot of time and cost. There are various methods and devices for the rehabilitation of these people, one of which is orthosis, and choosing the best orthosis helps them.
- Power orthoses are a new and very attractive topic in the field of rehabilitation of spinal cord injury patients, these orthoses are different types and many researches have been conducted on them, which have some contradictory results.
- This article examines the impact of power orthoses on walking and its related parameters, movement pattern, alternative movements and muscle contraction, so that the reader can get general information in this field to know the advantages and disadvantages of each orthoses and help the rehabilitation of people with spinal cord injuries; And the weak points for future research are also identified.
