Abstract
Falls continue to be a major safety and health concern for older adults. Researchers reported that increased gait variability was associated with increased fall risks. In the present study, we proposed a novel wearable soft robotic intervention and examined its effects on improving gait variability in older adults. The robotic system used customized pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) to provide assistive torque for ankle dorsiflexion during walking. Twelve older adults with low fall risks and twelve with medium-high fall risks participated in an experiment. The participants were asked to walk on a treadmill under no soft robotic intervention, inactive soft robotic intervention, and active soft robotic intervention, and their gait variability during treadmill walking was measured. The results showed that the proposed soft robotic intervention could reduce step length variability for elderly people with medium-high fall risks. These findings provide supporting evidence that the proposed soft robotic intervention could potentially serve as an effective solution to fall prevention for older adults.
Highlights
FALLS continue to be a major safety and health concern for older adults
Older adults with medium-high fall risk had significantly larger step length variability at the cadence level of 72 steps/min when compared with the low-risk older adults (Table 2)
Active intervention was observed to significantly reduce step length variability at the cadence levels of 48 steps/min and 72 steps/min, but inactive intervention did not make any differences in step length variability (Table 2 and Table 3)
Summary
FALLS continue to be a major safety and health concern for older adults. In the US, falls are the leading cause of both fatal and non-fatal injuries among people aged 65 and above [1]. Due to the aging population worldwide, there has been an increasing trend in fall injury incidences in recent years [2]. Falls have negative psychological consequences such as fear of falls, anxiety, and depression [3, 4]. These psychological consequences can make older adults lose independence in their daily living.
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Schedule a callMore From: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
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