Regular treadmills don’t mimic the real world, but C-Mill prepares physical therapy patients to step back into life.

People who undergo surgery, or have injuries, that involve their lower extremity often have problems which affect their walking, or gait pattern.

A gait pattern involves a lot of body activities, including landing on a single foot, stepping, rolling over one foot, and lifting the same foot over the ground. If you have issues with gait, it is essential to seek help from a reliable physical therapist for gait training.

Gait training involves a suite of exercises implemented by a physical therapist to help patients walk better. The activities include enhancing motion in your lower extremity joints, and improving balance and strength by mimicking the repetitive leg motions required for walking.

Common conditions that require gait therapy include:

• Poor Balance
• Lower extremity weakness
• Traumatic and acquired neurologic conditions
• Gait abnormalities due to pain

When you experience a lower extremity injury or have surgery, you may experience weakness or tightness in your legs. These will impact walking, and affect your balance and proprioception, or awareness of your body’s movement. Traditionally, a physical therapist will assess your gait, and design an exercise program to improve your gait.

Fortunately, there’s a cutting-edge gait-training system available to treat acute and chronic injuries for all patients. Gait rehabilitation technology has evolved exponentially to create an effortless treatment tool that mimics independent-living real-world scenarios, enabling patients to rehabilitate under normal circumstances, in a controlled environment.

Before starting any exercise program for improved gait, it would be best to consult your physician or physical therapist. They will walk you through potential programs with your safety in mind.

C-Mill: Balance Physical Therapy

C-Mill is an innovative treadmill by DIH improving on proven interventions for evaluating and treating impaired gait and balance. The C-Mill provides an ideal solution for effective functional movement therapy with new technological solutions, including augmented reality (AR), acoustic cues, virtual reality (VR), and force plate technology.

The C-Mill uses integrated applications to make the therapy sessions engaging, interactive, and fun. It comes with reliable obstacle-avoidance games, realistic virtual-reality environments, dual-tasking applications, and numerous balance challenges.

These exercises encourage gait-adaptability strategies, creating efficient and effective movement programs. What’s more, these activities occur in a safe and controlled environment.

C-Mill’s AR and VR capabilities don’t require excess time to set up obstacles, giving the patient more time for exercise, with more engaging and entertaining activities. The C-Mill technology also allows patients to take more steps, unlike conventional therapies such as the use of parallel bars.

With more intensity, repetitive exercises, and length of treatment, the training is more satisfying and rewarding for patients. It stimulates fast recovery of stability and gait.

C-Mill also features a unique force plate technology to allow accurate gait analysis, with real-time reporting. Such details empower therapists with valuable data to track patient progress and give immediate performance feedback.

Using C-Mill for foot placement, balancing, and dual-tasking is effortless. It has variations, like C-Mill VR or VR+, that are particularly effective for early or late rehabilitation.

Primary Applications for C-Mill

Variation and Direct Feedback

Trainers require reliable feedback from patients’ performance to customize training activities. With C-Mill, augmented and virtual reality environments provide various training exercises with direct feedback. The visual and auditory feedback will enable therapists to get short-term and long-term progress reports. It effectively tailors each session depending on the patient and their progress.

Gait Adaptability Therapy

Effective gait training requires a solution that adapts to the user’s needs. Every patient will have a unique need for optimal results. C-Mill leverages machine learning to offer tailored challenges to boost your exercises. Its adaptability features create a safe and controlled environment where you can train without hassle.

Quick Gait Evaluation

Performance measurement is essential to the patient and physical therapist to understand the efficacy of the training program. C-Mill software has several gait-measurement parameters that offer general oversight of the patient’s performance. It gives step length, frequency, width, and symmetry parameters for every step-to-step basis. These detailed session reports are generated automatically.

Significant Increase in Training Time

Walking tracks will have customized returns, obstacles, and stepping targets during C-Mill training. Patients have more access and time than conventional training techniques over a similar duration.

Customized Training and Research

Every patient has unique needs when it comes to gait training. C-Mill detects individual stimuli projected on the treadmill, creating a default training or developing a specific environmental program from scratch. Therapists can also customize adjustments for each patient, monitor immediate effects, set challenges, and generate efforts. All this occurs in a few clicks and in real-time.

C-Mill Features

C-Mill’s advanced design provides multiple applications with the patient’s progress in mind:

• Evaluation: Patients have access to custom programs for evaluating balance and walking ability. Effective evaluation is required to tailor exercise for optimal results.
• Movement training: The treadmill has a dedicated front video display that shows all the visual exercises you need.
• Walking pattern training: C-Mill projects targets and provides multi-sensory input to encourage proper walking skills.
• Foot placement training: C-Mill’s treadmill belt produces virtual obstacles to encourage appropriate stepping and gait symmetry.
• Automated feedback: Trainers and patients require regular feedback to tailor exercises — C-Mill provides direct visual and auditory feedback during training sessions.

Qualifications for C-Mill Use

C-Mill is a powerful and efficient rehabilitation tool. It is valuable for clinics’ gait, functional balance, and gait adaptability therapy, and allows patients to advance quickly and effectively.

C-Mill is medically certified, and operated by qualified physical therapists and occupational therapists. Pediatric to geriatric patients who suffer from all sorts of gait, stability and balance issues can benefit from training with C-Mill.

Are you ready to work with a cutting-edge balance and gait treadmill?

C-Mill effectively simulates challenging everyday scenarios to provide therapy patients treatments they can use to step into real life. Traditional treadmills don’t represent real-world settings, but C-Mill offers a practical training solution to navigate the real world.

Contact us at Brooks Rehabilitation to learn more about our C-Mill therapies and other services.