Dispositivo para análise da simetria muscular de quadril em pacientes hemiparéticos com aplicação no auxílio da reabilitação da marcha

Abstract

Abstract: Around the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 16 million people suffer cerebral vascular accident (CVA) every year. Many of these patients begin to hemiparesis stage, defined by motor impairment from one of body hemispheres after CVA, causing affecting muscle control. This dysfunction can affect a patient's ability to remain seated without postural deviation, as well as compromising the gait, caused by misalignment from patient's center of gravity, because it is necessary to submit his to a rehabilitation treatment. As rehabilitation basically seeks relearning of movements as of motor training, there is a demand for a device that is capable of measuring the efforts from patients. Therefore, for the case of hemiparetic patients, it is necessary to develop a device that captures the efforts underfoot and hip while his is sitting, standing, or both, because it is necessary to analyze the postural alignment hip and legs simultaneously. Thus, the methodology used to develop this work is implement a few force sensors because its goal is compare the signals from sensors checking that the efforts made in the sensors by left hemisphere of patient's body are equivalent to the right hemisphere. For this, the sensors were placed between two plastic sheets forming two platforms. These platforms are positioned under hips and legs of the patient's efforts to acquire and present the results graphically on a computer screen, which features a process of biofeedback. To measure strength eight piezoresistive pressure sensors are used. The sensor signals are conditioned and sent to a CPU based on ARM microcontroller 32-bit Cortex-M4that communicates with the computer through the USB port. On the computer, a Matlab ® app show to the user a bargraph in real-timethe streight exerted on each of the eight sensors. The prototype has a lower cost than concurrent due to the use of low-cost components. One of the benefits of this tool to aid rehabilitation is the possibility of quantitative assessment (not subjective) of the patient's postural alignment. Although some difficulties have occurred on the results, as deformation of plates used, it is expected that the developed device can be used as a functional prototype for being propagated like bases on new studies and improvements of the survey area. In the future, it is expected that other tests with similar devices have being performed in specialized clinics, education and research institutions and professionals in order to improve the quality of analysis and biofeedback rehabilitation treatments.