Feasibility Study of a Closed-Loop Functional Electrical Stimulation System Driven by Multimodal Sensing for Personalized Rehabilitation

Abstract

This paper presents a non-invasive, automatically controlled closed-loop functional electrical stimulation system based on multimodal sensing, designed as a potential assistive tool for neuromuscular rehabilitation. The system adopts a hardware-software co-design embedded architecture that performs real-time signal processing, decision-making, and adaptive control based on the user’s movement intention and state. When preset conditions are met, the system drives the signal generator to deliver functional electrical stimulation. It can provide an innovative therapeutic approach for the neuromuscular functional rehabilitation of hemiplegic patients. The system design and the integration of the prototype have been done. The prototype can generate different stimulation waveforms and supports the flexible customization of the treatment plans with personalized parameters for the patient. The muscle stimulation experiment on three healthy subjects demonstrates that the prototype can induce observable muscle contraction while maintaining comfort, indicating its feasibility for further investigation. The prototype system developed in our study shows the feasibility of the functional electrical stimulation based on multimodal sensing and closed-loop control for the hemiplegia rehabilitation application.