A Study on Body Part Motion Caused by Improper Crutch Walk

Up to now, several kinds of walk assisting devices have been developed, and these have been usually used by injured patients. Patients who have their leg injured often use crutches in order to reduce their weight to be borne with their injured leg, because crutches are regarded as familiar devices. However, some patients who were injured by sudden accidents don't know about proper methods to use the crutches, which results in improper usages: the improper usage may cause the patients to fall down, and it sometimes leads to more serious injuries. For these patients, it is effective to evaluate if the patient's method to use the crutches is proper or not based on the measurements of the walk motions in early rehabilitation stage. In addition, the walk motions had better been measured in a simple way rather than using complex measurement devices. In this paper, relationships between improper crutch walk and motions of participant's body parts were discussed, and its result is expected to be utilized to show which body part is most influenced by the improper crutch walk. In crutch walk experiment, motions of participants' thigh, knee and toe, body acceleration and tilting angle of the crutch were measured. As a result, especially, the motion of thigh was most influenced by the improper crutch walk. From this result, it was confirmed that crutch walks can be evaluated by measuring only the motion of thigh. This result may also show that thigh performs a crucial function for preventing falling in crutch walks.