Sensorized Tip for Monitoring People with Multiple Sclerosis that Require Assistive Devices for Walking

Abstract

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurological degenerative disease with high impact on our society. In order to mitigate its effects, proper rehabilitation therapy is mandatory, in which individualisation is a key factor. Technological solutions can provide the information required for this purpose, by monitoring patients and extracting relevant indicators. In this work, a novel Sensorized Tip is proposed for monitoring People with Multiple Sclerosis (PwMS) that require Assistive Devices for Walking (ADW) such as canes or crutches. The developed Sensorized Tip can be adapted to the personal ADW of each patient to reduce its impact, and provides sensor data while naturally walking in the everyday activities. This data that can be processed to obtain relevant indicators that helps assessing the status of the patient. Different from other approaches, a full validation of the proposed processing algorithms is carried out in this work, and a preliminary study-case is carried out with PwMS considering a set of indicators obtained from the Sensorized Tip’s processed data. Results of the preliminary study-case demonstrate the potential of the device to monitor and characterise patient status.