Starting and finishing gait detection using a BMI for spinal cord injury rehabilitation

Regain the ability of walking represents a great progress for people with disabilities. The main goal of this paper is the verification of a method to detect the intention of starting and finishing the gait. This method was checked using recordings from spinal cord injury patients. The system has been designed to be part of the control of a lower limb wearable exoskeleton which will be used not only in the rehabilitation process but also for assistive tasks. Four patients took part in this experiment. Three of them obtained hopeful results achieving a high rate in the detection of the start and stop intentions (68.6% in averaged) with a low rate of wrong classification (around 1.51 wrong detection per minute in average), obtaining a good accuracy of the system (around 80.0%). However, the system does not seem accurate in one of the patients (P3).