Informing haptic feedback design for gait retraining

Gait retraining, a promising treatment for knee osteoarthritis, requires the modification of three separate joint motions. In this paper we present the results of three studies to inform the design of a wearable haptic feedback system for this application. The first study motivates our choice of feedback modality for each of the motions. The latter two studies explore how to present haptic feedback to train three different motions concurrently. When feedback is presented simultaneously, subjects have poor perception of three or more haptic cues, tend to focus on only one motion at a time, and require several steps to modify all three motions. These findings suggest that vibrational feedback should be presented one joint at a time for haptic gait retraining.