Sensor-Based Gait Rehabilitation for Total Hip and Knee Replacement Patients and Those at Risk of Falling: Review Article

Recovering a normal gait after injury or maintaining a normal gait as people age is critical to maintaining mobility and health in later life. This review looks at the evidence relating to recovery of a normal gait after total hip or knee replacement and suggests how this may be improved using a sensor based approach. Conventional methods of monitoring gait use an optical gait laboratory, which is both costly and time consuming and therefore it is not a routine procedure for people in a clinical or home based setting. Unfortunately, all the evidence suggests that most people who undergo joint replacement do not recover a normal gait and this has an effect on their health. This suggests that people tend to stop the rehabilitation phase too early and this may be associated with a lack of monitoring. Recently, sensor-based system have been used to monitor joint replacement patients and arrived at the same conclusions as the optical gait laboratory trials, and therefore such a system can be used with confidence in the general clinical setting. Pilot studies have been carried out using these sensors, one following a patient recovering from a total hip replacement (THR) for 8 months and the second a two year longitudinal study following a group of elderly people at risk of falling. Both studies show that monitoring improves the outcome, with the THR patient recovering a normal gait and all 11 people at risk of falling remaining mobile with no falls over the two year period. This indicates that, with the advent of sensor based monitoring; gait rehabilitation can be applied in a broad range of situations, improving patient outcome and satisfaction.