Understanding motor recovery in subacute stroke using split-belt treadmill and virtual reality.

Summary

This study is looking at how people with post-stroke impaired walking acquire a new walking pattern during rehabilitation within the first 6 months of a stroke. A common way to improve gait and walking in patients who have neurological injuries employs treadmill walking with body weight support. However, treadmill walking has been criticized for a lack of patient engagement. Our lab uses a specially instrumented treadmill called the split-belt treadmill in conjunction with a virtual reality system to improve patient engagement. A split-belt treadmill typically has two belts that each move at a different speed, allowing the affected leg to move at a different speed than the unaffected leg. This is not possible in conventional treadmill training.

Using this novel virtual reality-assisted split-belt treadmill allows us to motivate patients through an engaging form of rehabilitation to improve the recovery of motor, visual, and cognitive functions. We want to look at how safe the new virtual reality platform is for rehabilitation and assess patient satisfaction and motivation while interacting with virtual environments. We will also collect information on how healthy people and people with different neurological injuries perform on the different virtual reality tasks while relearning a new walking pattern. We hope that the results of this work will help move towards better therapies for stroke survivors with lower extremity deficits.