Extending the Law of Intersegmental Coordination: Implications for Powered Prosthetic Controls

Abstract

Powered prostheses are capable of providing net positive work to amputees and have advanced in the past two decades. However, reducing amputee metabolic cost of walking remains an open problem. The Law of Intersegmental Coordination (ISC) has been observed across gaits and has been previously implicated in energy expenditure of walking, yet it has rarely been analyzed or applied within the context of lower-limb amputee gait. This law states that the elevation angles of the thigh, shank and foot over the gait cycle are not independent. In this work, we developed a method to analyze intersegmental coordination for lower-limb 3D kinematic data, to simplify ISC analysis. Moreover, inspired by motor control, biomechanics and robotics literature, we used our method to broaden ISC toward a new law of coordination of moments. We find these Elevation Space Moments (ESM), and present results showing a moment-based coordination for able bodied gait. We also analyzed ISC for amputee gait walking with powered and passive prosthesis, and found that while elevation angles remained planar, the ESM showed less coordination. We use ISC as a constraint to predict the shank angles/moments that would compensate for alterations due to a passive foot so as to mimic a healthy thigh angle/moment profile. This may have implications for improving powered prosthetic control. We developed the ISC3d toolbox that is freely available online, which may be used to compute kinematic and kinetic ISC in 3D. This provides a means to further study the role of coordination in gait and may help address fundamental questions of the neural control of human movement.