The improvement of the lower limb exoskeletons on the gait of patients with spinal cord injury: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Spinal Cord Injury is a severely disabling disease. In the process of Spinal Cord Injury rehabilitation treatment, improving patients’ walking ability, improving their self-care ability, and enhancing patients’ self-esteem is an important aspect of their return to society, which can also reduce the cost of patients, so the rehabilitation of lower limbs is very important. The lower limb exoskeleton robot is a bionic robot designed according to the principles of robotics, mechanism, bionics, control theory, communication technology, and information processing technology, which can be worn on the lower limb of the human body and complete specific tasks under the user's control. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of the lower limb exoskeleton on the improvement of gait function in patients with spinal cord injury. METHODS: The following electronic databases will be searched from inception to January 2022: PubMed, the Cochrane Library, Embase, Scopus, EBSCO, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, WanFang Data, Weipu Electronics. In addition, reference lists of the included studies were manually searched to identify additional relevant studies. Randomized controlled trials were collected to examine the effect of lower limb exoskeletons on lower limb functional recovery in spinal cord injury patients. We will consider inclusion, select high-quality articles for data extraction and analysis, and summarize the intervention effect of lower limb exoskeletons on the upper limb function of spinal cord injury patients. Two reviewers will screen titles, abstracts, and full texts independently according to inclusion criteria; Data extraction and risk of bias assessment were performed in the included studies. We will use a hierarchy of recommended assessment, development, and assessment methods to assess the overall certainty of the evidence and report findings accordingly. Endnote X8 will be applied in selecting the study, Review Manager 5.3 will be applied in analyzing and synthesizing. RESULTS: The results will provide evidence for judging whether lower limb exoskeletons are effective and safe in improving lower limb function in patients with spinal cord injury. CONCLUSION: Our study will provide reliable evidence for the effect of lower limb exoskeletons on the improvement of lower limb function in spinal cord injury patients. INPLASY REGISTRATION NUMBER: INPLASY202180095.