BACKGROUND Conclusive evidence indicating an effective treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), a common entrapment neuropathy, is lacking. Ultrasound therapy (US therapy) has long been used as one of the combination treatments for CTS. In addition, paraffin bath therapy has been applied widely as a physical modality in treating patients with hand conditions. The purpose of this randomized t...

Current practice and guidelines recommend the use of neck orthoses for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to compensate for neck weakness and to provide surrogate neck control. However, available options are frequently described by patients as restrictive and unsuitable and there was a need for a new device that addressed the needs of people with ALS. This project utilized a co-des...

Several pathologies of the foot can be solved simply by adding an orthosis under the patient’s foot. Defining the geometry and the size of such orthosis is key in optimizing its influence on the foot. For example, an orthosis with a heel lift (HL) has an increased height below the heel to force the patient to put his weight on front of the foot. An orthosis with a metatarsal bar associated with...

Paraplegic users of mechanical walking orthoses, e.g. advanced reciprocating gait orthosis (ARGO), often face high energy expenditure and extreme upper body loading during locomotion. We studied the effect of kinematical pattern on the mechanical performance of paraplegic locomotion, in search for an improved gait pattern that leads to lower muscular efforts. A three-dimensional, four segment, ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the efficacy of tibial nerve blocking by percutaneous radiofrequency thermocoagulation and an ankle-foot orthosis on the walking ability of stroke patients with a spastic equinus or equinovarus foot. DESIGN A placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial with a 2 x 2 factorial design and with a 3-month follow-up. SETTING Outpatient clinic of a department of rehabilit...

Background. Osteoarthritis (OA) is a disease which influences the performance of the knee joint. Moreover, the force and moments applied on the joint increase in contrast to normal subjects. Various types of knee orthoses have been designed to solve the mentioned problems. However, there are other problems in terms of distal migration during walking and the alignment of the orthosis which canno...

The design of an active leg orthosis for tumble protection is proposed in this paper. The orthosis would be applied to assist elders or invalids in rebalancing while they fall unexpectedly. We observe the regain balance motion of healthy and youthful people, and find the difference to elders or invalids. First, the physical model of leg would be established, and we consider the leg motions are ...

Design of active orthosis is a challenging problem from both the dynamic simulation and control points of view. The redundancy problem of the simultaneous human-orthosis actuation is an interesting exercise to solve concerning the analytical and computational cost effectiveness. The physiological static optimization approach tries to solve the actuation sharing problem. Its objective is to quan...

Background: The back extensor muscles are the main spinal supportive factors which function establishes spinal stability and erect posture of the spine. Spine deviation from the ideal alignment, like abnormal increase in the forward curvature of the thoracic spine may cause changes in the trunk muscle activity which can lead to a change in the spinal proprioception. It seems that the corrected ...

Purpose of study. The purpose this study is to analyze the effect sacral-lumbar orthoses on occurrence pain in patients with low back (LBP) and effects these muscles that stabilize trunk based available literature. Methods. For study, following databases were searched: Pubmed, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Medline, others using Google Scholar search engine keywords: pain, lbp exercise, epidemiology, o...