Application of FES for hemiplegia in extremity coordination training

After stroke happened, central nervous system (CNS) damage causes not only drop foot, but also upper extremity limit when the patient is walking. Drop foot causes the pain on the patient's legs, and furthermore, it may make the patient fall down. The general way to treat is to equip the patient with ankle foot orthoses or commit Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) on the drop foot. However, CVA patient treatment lacks of upper extremity when the upper extremity training is applied. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to integrate two electrical channel stimulator to improve CVA patients' bad walking posture coming from drop foot and upper extremity swing limit. This system provides a hardware control interface and a gait stimulation timing control unit. The two-channel electrical stimulator's source is Trio-300 and the system controller core is Pic18F4520. The foot switch detects patients' steps to control FES output. By FES, controlling the patients' extremity could improve CVA patient walking safety and extremity balance.