Musical Stairs: A motivational therapy tool for children with disabilities featuring automated detection of stair-climbing gait events via inertial sensors.
Med Eng Phys
; 40: 95-102, 2017 02.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-28110887
ABSTRACT
Stair-climbing is a key component of rehabilitation therapies for children with physical disabilities. This paper reports on the design of a system, Musical Stairs, to provide auditory feedback during stair-climbing therapies. Musical Stairs is composed of two foot-mounted inertial sensors, a step detection algorithm, and an auditory feedback response. In Phase 1, we establish its clinical feasibility via a Wizard-of-Oz AB/BA cross-over design with 17 children, aged 4-6 years, having diverse diagnoses and gait abilities. Self-, therapist- and blinded-observer reports indicated increased motivation with auditory feedback. Phase 2 describes the construction of a database comprised of synchronized video and inertial data associated with 1568 steps up and down stairs completed by 26 children aged 4-6 years with diverse diagnoses and gait. Lastly, in Phase 3, data from 18 children in the database were used to train a rule-based step detection algorithm based on local minima in the acceleration profile and the foot's swing angle. A step detection rate of 96% [SD=3%] and false positive rate of 6% [SD=5%] were achieved with an independent test set (n=8). Recommendations for future development and evaluation are discussed.
Key words
Full text:
1
Database:
MEDLINE
Therapeutic Methods and Therapies TCIM:
Terapias_energeticas
/
Musicoterapia
Main subject:
Rehabilitation
/
Auditory Perception
/
Disabled Children
/
Feedback, Physiological
/
Gait
/
Monitoring, Physiologic
/
Motivation
Type of study:
Diagnostic_studies
/
Guideline
Language:
En
Journal:
Med Eng Phys
Year:
2017
Type:
Article