Speaker: Gabrielle Labrozzi
Advisors: Prof. R. Triolo and Dr. Musa Audu
Abstract: Walking mobility is an important activity for navigating daily life, enhancing health, and increasing quality of life after paralysis from spinal cord injury (SCI). Muscle strength, balance, and coordination are different determinants of gait that are impacted post-SCI. SCI compromises balance, quality, and speed of gait. Rehabilitation research typically focuses on clinical outcomes based on gait speed and muscle strength (e.g., 10-Meter Walk Test, Lower Extremity Motor Score). While these metrics are valid and reliable, they do not reflect whole-body movement which is a critical issue for rehabilitation interventions. The center of mass (CoM) is a global parameter that reflects whole-body movement, follows well-defined trajectories during neurotypical (NT) gait, associates with balance, and changes predictably with various gait impairments. We hypothesize that the CoM kinematics can quantitatively differentiate between clinically accepted ambulatory categories, has a 0.90 or greater correlation with outcome measures, and is suitable to document progress of rehabilitation interventions, such as neuromuscular stimulation. We conducted four experimental sessions with five individuals with incomplete SCI. During the first two sessions each participant walked with their preferred assistive device and speed along a 10-m walkway to analytically compute the global CoM. We assessed clinical outcome measures during the last two sessions. Based on the work of Minetti et al., we optimized a mathematical model of the CoM to obtain the single-sine coefficients. In this presentation, I will address the results from optimizing the coefficients of the CoM model and correlating the features of the CoM to the clinical outcome measures. These results provide the foundation for new rehabilitation methods, and may prove useful for predicting responders to new interventions such as automatically tuning or controlling peripheral nerve stimulation to accelerate progress toward NT gait post-SCI.