Zoulias, Ioannis D, Armengol, Monica, Poulton, Adrian, Andrews, Brian, Gibbons, Robin, Harwin, William S and Holderbaum, William (2019). Novel instrumented frame for standing exercising of users with complete spinal cord injuries. Scientific Reports, 9 (1),
Abstract
This paper describes a Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) standing system for rehabilitation of bone mineral density (BMD) in people with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI). BMD recovery offers an increased quality of life for people with SCI by reducing their risk of fractures. The standing system developed comprises an instrumented frame equipped with force plates and load cells, a motion capture system, and a purpose built 16-channel FES unit. This system can simultaneously record and process a wide range of biomechanical data to produce muscle stimulation which enables users with SCI to safely stand and exercise. An exergame provides visual feedback to the user to assist with upper-body posture control during exercising. To validate the system an alternate weight-shift exercise was used; 3 participants with complete SCI exercised in the system for 1 hour twice-weekly for 6 months. We observed ground reaction forces over 70% of the full body-weight distributed to the supporting leg at each exercising cycle. Exercise performance improved for each participant by an increase of 13.88 percentage points of body-weight in the loading of the supporting leg during the six-month period. Importantly, the observed ground reaction forces are of higher magnitude than other studies which reported positive effects on BMD. This novel instrumentation aims to investigate weight bearing standing therapies aimed at determining the biomechanics of lower limb joint force actions and postural kinematics.
| Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49237-3 |
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| Divisions: | College of Engineering & Physical Sciences College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > School of Engineering and Technology > Mechanical, Biomedical & Design |
| Additional Information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | General |
| Publication ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Mar 2024 08:35 |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Oct 2019 09:47 |
| Full Text Link: | |
| Related URLs: |
https://www.nat ... 598-019-49237-3
(Publisher URL) http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL) |
PURE Output Type: | Article |
| Published Date: | 2019-09-10 |
| Accepted Date: | 2019-08-15 |
| Authors: |
Zoulias, Ioannis D
Armengol, Monica Poulton, Adrian Andrews, Brian Gibbons, Robin Harwin, William S Holderbaum, William ( 
0000-0002-1677-9624)
|
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)