BACKGROUND Loss of neuromuscular control of the ankle joint is a common impairment in neurologic conditions, leading to abnormal gait and a greater risk of falling. Limited information, however, is available on the effectiveness of functional electrical stimulation (FES) on reducing falls, and no studies have investigated its usefulness in improving lower limbs kinematics related to foot cleara...

OBJECTIVE to conduct a systematic review of published studies that test the validity and reliability of fall-risk assessment tools for use among older adults in community, home-support, long-term and acute care settings. METHODS searches were conducted in EbscoHost and MEDLINE for published studies in the English language between January 1980 and July 2004, where the primary or secondary purp...

Objectives: Ankle Foot Orthoses (AFOs) are widely utilized to improve walking ability in hemiplegic patients. The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of Rocker bar Ankle Foot Orthosis (RAFO) on functional mobility in post-stroke hemiplegic patients. Methods: Fifteen hemiplegic patients (men and women) who were at least 6-months poststroke and able to walk without an assis...

INTRODUCTION The current study uses the Language Independent Functional Evaluation (L.I.F.E.) to evaluate disability in a smaller Ghanaian coastal town to characterize the extent and nature of disability. The L.I.F.E. is a video animated, language free equivalent of the standard 10-item verbal/written Barthel Index functional assessment. METHODS Over a four-month period, the L.I.F.E. survey w...

A new approach for the assessment of gait patterns is presented. The use of neural network techniques for decision making in gait analysis is for some purposes more effective than biomechanical methods or conventional statistics. To demonstrate this, a neural network was trained to distinguish 'healthy' from 'pathological' gait. The algorithm presented here can be used for several purposes beca...

Lameness is one of the most important dairy cow welfare issues and has inspired a growing body of literature on gait assessment. Validation studies have shown that several methods of gait assessment are able to successfully distinguish cows with and without painful pathologies. While subjective methods provide an immediate, on-site assessment and require no technical equipment, they show variat...