In daily life, mobility requires walking while performing a cognitive or upper-extremity motor task. Although previous studies have evaluated the effects of dual tasks on gait performance, few studies have evaluated cortical activation and its association with gait disturbance during dual tasks. In this study, we simultaneously assessed gait performance and cerebral oxygenation in the bilateral...

OBJECTIVES to explore the associations between spatiotemporal gait parameters and falls in cognitively impaired older people and to investigate whether sensorimotor and neuropsychological factors mediate the association between gait performance and falls. DESIGN prospective cohort study with a 1 year follow-up. SETTING community-dwelling sample. PARTICIPANTS sixty-four participants (62-96...

Many patients with acoustic neuroma experience hearing loss, tinnitus, and equilibrium disturbance. Gait studies performed using tactile sensors placed under the feet have indicated that an acoustic neuroma causes unstable gait, even though this cannot be detected by visual observation. Three-dimensional motion analysis is a useful tool to assess gait. The purpose of this study was to use a thr...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of a knee-ankle-foot orthosis powered by artificial pneumatic muscles (PKAFO). METHODS Twenty-three hemiplegic patients (age, 59.6±13.7 years) were assessed 19.7±36.6 months after brain lesion. The 10-m walking time was measured as a gait parameter while the individual walked on a treadmill. Walking speed (m/s), step cycle (cycle/s), and...

Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetically based neurodevelopmental disorder, is characterized by gait abnormalities that resemble basal ganglia-parkinsonian deficits in the internal regulation of stride length. In the current study, we explored whether visual or attentional cues would improve gait function in adults with WS, when compared to adults with Down syndrome (DS) and neurologically no...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to compare the gait parameters of age-matched people with a normal gait (≥ 65 years), age-matched people with knee pain, and age-matched people with walker dependent gait at a self-selected gait speed. [Methods] Subjects walked on even ground in bare feet and were allowed a natural arm swing on a 6-m walkway. Walker-dependent participants walked on a walk...

INTRODUCTION This study compared the balance by center of pressure (COP) and its relationship with gait parameters and functional independence in left (LH) and right (RH) chronic stroke patients. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, twenty-one hemiparetic stroke patients were assessed for Functional Independence Measure (FIM), balance with a force platform, and gait in the Motion Analysis L...

Functional mobility is viewed as essential to enabling an individual to engage in full range of life areas and is central to enabling the individual to participate in live situations. The walking after stroke is characterized by slow gait speed, poor endurance and in the quality and adaptability of walking patterns. The instantaneous adaptation to speed and load changes during over ground locom...

Increasing the energy autonomy of a hopping one-legged robot is studied in this paper. For a particular passive gait, of all those possible, the energy dissipated per unit length of travel is shown to be less than for any other gait. This optimal gait is identified analytically, by exploiting the commonly used SLIP model to simplify real robot dynamics. Both mechanical and electrical losses are...

In this paper, we studied numerically both kinematic and dynamic models of a biologically inspired mammal-like octopod robot walking with a tetrapod gait. Three different nonlinear oscillators were used to drive the robot’s legs working as central pattern generators. In addition, also a new, relatively simple and efficient model was proposed and investigated. The introduced model of the gait ge...