Subject

Walking disabilities can greatly influence someone’s daily’s activities, participation in social activities and quality of life. That is why regaining the ability to walk again is of high priority. Training your walking function is often done on a treadmill. A more advanced type of treadmill system is the self-paced treadmill. With this type of treadmill, the person is in control and can change speed at will. The treadmill will follow the person who is walking on the treadmill. It is this type of treadmill system that is gaining ground in the field of rehabilitation.
There are some self-paced treadmills that are already commercialized, but there are also several ways to create your own self-paced treadmill system. Different types of data can be used to control the speed of the treadmill. The method that is most used is a position based control system. Here, the position of the person walking on the treadmill will influence the speed of the treadmill: if the person is moving more to the front of the treadmill, the treadmill will accelerate and if the person is moving more to the back, the treadmill will decelerate.
Controlling the speed of a treadmill with the use of motion capture data will be the focus of this master thesis. Your task will be to find a way to create a self-paced treadmill with motion capture data of the VICON cameras (https://www.vicon.com/). This will take place in a new gait lab, which is located at the VUB campus in Jette (https://rere.research.vub.be/our-lab). In this lab, there is a treadmill (https://www.lode.nl/en/product/valiant-2-cpet/435) and VICON cameras at your disposal.
This topic of master thesis is in cooperation with the Rehabilitation Research group of the VUB (https://rere.research.vub.be/).