The effect of a water exercise on gait characteristics in the elderly post stroke patients

Objective: To investigate the effect of long-term water exercise on gait parameters in the elderly post stroke patients. Design: One group pretest-posttest design. Methods: Twenty elderly post stroke patients (age: $56.5{\pm}10.1$ years, height: $168.6{\pm}5.8cm$, body mass: $69.3{\pm}6.9kg$, handicapped level: $2.5{\pm}0.8$) participated in this study. Participants took part in gait training of 1 hour per day, three days per week, for three months. Participants' gaits were analyzed to find the effect of 3 months water exercise by a 3-D motion analysis with 8 infrared camera and 1 force plate (sampling frequency: 100 and 1,000 Hz, respectively). A paired t-test was used to find the significance with significant level as 0.05. Results: Gait velocity, step length & step width significantly increased, and asymmetric index for gait parameters significantly decreased after the water exercise (p<0.05). Conclusions: The water exercise effectively affect on patients' gait ability and electromyography analysis will be needed further study.