A Wearable Personalised Sonification and Biofeedback Device to Enhance Movement Awareness.

Movement sonification has emerged as a promising approach for rehabilitation and motion control. Despite significant advancements in sensor technologies, challenges remain in developing cost-effective, user-friendly, and reliable systems for gait detection and sonification. This study introduces a novel wearable personalised sonification and biofeedback device to enhance movement awareness for individuals with irregular gait and posture. Through the integration of inertial measurement units (IMUs), MATLAB, and sophisticated audio feedback mechanisms, the device offers real-time, intuitive cues to facilitate gait correction and improve functional mobility. Utilising a single wearable sensor attached to the L4 vertebrae, the system captures kinematic parameters to generate auditory feedback through discrete and continuous tones corresponding to heel strike events and sagittal plane rotations. A preliminary test that involved 20 participants under various audio feedback conditions was conducted to assess the system's accuracy, reliability, and user synchronisation. The results indicate a promising improvement in movement awareness facilitated by auditory cues. This suggests a potential for enhancing gait and balance, particularly beneficial for individuals with compromised gait or those undergoing a rehabilitation process. This paper details the development process, experimental setup, and initial findings, discussing the integration challenges and future research directions. It also presents a novel approach to providing real-time feedback to participants about their balance, potentially enabling them to make immediate adjustments to their posture and movement. Future research should evaluate this method in varied real-world settings and populations, including the elderly and individuals with Parkinson's disease.

Effect of continuous auditory feedback (CAF) on human movements and motion awareness.

Continuous Auditory Feedback (CAF) can have profound effects when used to guide bodily movements. CAF is defined as auditory feedback that responds dynamically to continuous streams of data. A large number of studies have used CAF to communicate dynamic human efforts in the body. In contrast, this study uses motion sensor data at the knee and hip joints, which were converted to auditory sounds, to communicate the dynamic phases of walking gait through shifts in tonal brightness and loudness of two tones with harmonic relationships. As a proof-of-concept study, our aim was to determine if CAF mapped to hip and knee movements affects a person's gait. A total of 10 participants, five males and five females, participated in a gait analysis in a Biomechanics lab in relation to the various sound conditions. Quantitative results revealed that CAF has a significant effect on cadence. Notably, females had a higher cadence compared with males. Qualitative responses suggested that participants were aware of a relationship between the rotation of the knee and hip as the rise and fall of audio tonal brightness to concentrate or synchronize their gait. We defined this as a brightness-rotation relationship. Based on these findings, we propose future investigations to further understand and extend this brightness-rotation relationship and develop reliable models of CAF to support movement awareness for gait training and rehabilitation program. These investigations will inform future development of wearable systems of on-body sensing and auditory feedback for this awareness and rehabilitation.