A Novel Center of Mass (CoM) Perception Approach for Lower-Limbs Stroke Rehabilitation

Lower limb rehabilitation robots are of great significance for poststroke patients to regain locomotion ability. However, most rehabilitation robots fail to take the movement of CoM of human body into account. Considering that CoM is an essential index to assess the recovery effect and improve the treatment, we propose a simple, economic, portable, and highly efficient CoM perception approach based on Kinect camera. This novel method is capable of detecting the displacement and rotation of CoM in multi-planes. Results of walking tests show that our approach has competitive performance in capturing the variation trends of CoM compared with multi-cameras motion capture system, especially in some directions with large displacement variation. The high accuracy, simple and low-cost detection of CoM is a major step forward towards practical application in the assessment of rehabilitation after stroke.