Wireless instrumented cane for walking monitoring in Parkinson patients

Instrumentation of conventional aids (walking stick, ortho-cane, crutch, walker, etc.) can generate numerous benefits for both the clinician and the patient, aiming at the improvement of walking activity. In this paper, a designed, fabricated and tested instrumented cane is presented. Its versatile characteristics permit an adoption for different applications. In this paper, the instrumented cane is personalized and tested in order to monitor the ambulation of Parkinson patients. The cane permits to monitor axial forces by means of a strain-bridge and movements by means of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). It is also composed of a conditioning and transmission circuit, and a power management circuit. All the circuits are integrated on a circuit board. The designed device has been made in order to miniaturize the circuit board and improve the output signal during gait. A Bluetooth module transmits the data wirelessly to a remote computer. The acquisition data can be saved and viewed by a developed user interface realized with LabVIEW. The tilt and force sensing of the cane have been tested, and characterized in the laboratory. The mean experimental standard deviation was about 20 N for axial forces. Hysteresis, linearity, and drift were calculated, and the obtained accuracy was about 0.8°. The instrumented cane prototype is under trials to be adopted for the Parkinsonian community, in order to monitor their ambulation during rehabilitation sessions and as a proposal to detect the “mysterious clinical phenomenon” that is the Freezing of Gait (FoG).