Backward Walking

Lovely Readers,

So, it looks like I'll be finally working with subjects this Saturday and the following Monday. I can't express how excited I am to see the concepts I've been working in action. Today, I think we should cover a little more about backward walking and the implications surrounding it. 

First, we should talk about physical and occupational therapy. Physical therapy (PT) is "the treatment of a disease or an injury of the muscles or joints with massage, exercises, heat, etc" whereas occupational therapy (OT) is the "treatment that helps people who have physical or mental problems learn to do the activities of daily life". When someone suffers from the loss of a limb, they go through physical and occupational therapy to become accustomed to their new prosthetic limb. But, even with passive devices, backward walking isn't typically covered during treatment, so it's extremely unlikely that the BiOM would be covered either. 

This all links to a concept called Proprioception, which is "the ability to sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium." As you can imagine, this becomes much harder for someone who has no neurological connections to a part of their body--i.e. the prosthesis. Simply, these patients don't know where in space their foot is. Hopefully, when BiOM becomes more commercially available and affordable, they will include backward walking as part of both physical and occupational therapy, which will, by extent, help a patient's Proprioception. 

This is a hopeful and necessary goal especially in concerns related to testing. When a subject is more comfortable and aware of how the device moves, testing will be much more realistic. This is because a subject typically has countless hours with the prosthesis, but significantly less time with BiOM, they're simply more used to the prosthesis, making it easier and more adjustable to them. Thankfully, this hasn't had a large or noticeable effect on our tests. Problematically, before the device can be used in backward walking PT/OT, the device needs to have a solid and reliable history with backwards walking. Meaning, the device needs to be reliable before PT/OT but also usable enough to undergo more testing (I'm sorry that was so confusing. This is an unbelievably tricky medium researchers have to find). 

So, with that, let's talk about how the patients felt about the Winding Filament Hypothesis (WFH) (our algorithm, not the passive) and the BiOM in general. There is some good news. Some. The subject found the BiOM was consistently wrong, so he'd lose control, but consistently. Meaning, he could react appropriately because the BiOM would respond in the same way with every step, though responding incorrectly. Whereas the WFH was less consistent in its movements, so it sometimes reacted correctly and sometimes incorrectly, making it significantly less predictable. So, the subject had a harder time keeping up with it. 

*My definitions for physical therapy and occupational therapy came from Merriam-Webster and my definition for Proprioception came from MedicineNet.com. 

Thanks for reading!
Pooja