Assessment of crutch-assisted walking with sensorized crutches in a 6-Minute Walk Test

This paper presents a possible application of mCrutch, a mobile health system consisting of a pair of sensorized crutches and a mobile Android application, with the purpose of recording the applied force and crutch orientation during a 6-minute walking test with a single crutch. We developed a MATLAB-based threshold algorithm for the segmentation of stance crutch events in analogy with gait analysis. A morphological analysis was performed to quantitatively and visually depict various stance features. The threshold algorithm achieved a segmentation accuracy of 94%. The whole application helps in gaining a comprehensive quantification of stance-related features across various phases of the test.Clinical Relevance: This approach facilitates the design and development of additional algorithms aimed at gathering clinically relevant parameters pertaining to crutch movement within the context of the human-crutch system.