Dynamic Stability of Walking during Anterior-posterior and Medio-lateral Support Surface and Visual Field Translations

Improving the ability to react to perturbations during daily activities like walking is a key to effective fall prevention training. Quantifying how walking stability changes in response to destabilizing events is critical for assessing how effective gait training interventions are. When small perturbations of increasing amplitude were applied to a dynamic model of walking, the model did not become orbitally more unstable, but did become locally more unstable [1]. In humans, healthy elderly were both orbitally and locally more unstable than healthy young adult subjects during unperturbed walking [2]. However, changes in orbital and local stability have not been assessed in humans during perturbed walking.