Abstract
BackgroundWearing a textured shoe insole can decrease postural sway during static balance. Previous studies assessed bipedal and/or unipedal standing. In contrast, we aimed to investigate if textured insoles modulated postural sway during four stance types (bipedal, standard Romberg, tandem Romberg, and unipedal), with and without vision.MethodsThe repeated measures design involved 28 healthy young adults (13 females; mean age = 26.86 ± 6.6 yrs) performing quiet standing in the four stance types on a force platform, under two different insole conditions (textured insole; TI vs. smooth insole; SI), with eyes open and eyes closed. Postural sway was assessed via the range and standard deviation of the COP excursions in the anterior-posterior and medial-lateral sway, and overall mean velocity.ResultsThe main effect of insole type was statistically significant at the alpha p = 0.05 level (p = 0.045). Compared to smooth insoles, textured insoles reduced the standard deviation of anterior-posterior excursions (APSD). While simple main effect analyses revealed this was most pronounced during eyes closed bipedal standing, insole type did not provide a statistically significant interaction with either stance or vision in this measure, or any other. Postural sway showed statistically significant increases across both stance type (bipedal < standard Romberg < tandem Romberg < unipedal), and vision (eyes closed < eyes open), in almost all measures. Stance and vision did have a statistically significant interaction in each measure, reflecting greater postural disturbances with eyes closed when stance stability decreased.ConclusionsOverall, these results support textured insole use in healthy young adults to reduce postural sway measures. This is because APSD is an index of spatial variability, where a decrease is associated with improved balance and possibly translates to reduced falls risk. Placing a novel texture in the shoe presumably modulated somatosensory inputs. It is important to understand the underlying mechanisms by which textured insoles influence postural sway. As such, utilising a healthy adult group allows us to investigate possible mechanisms of textured insoles. Future research could investigate the potential underlying mechanisms of textured insole effects at a neuromuscular and cortical level, in healthy young adults.
Highlights
Wearing a textured shoe insole can decrease postural sway during static balance
Simple main effect analyses investigating each of the four stance types in the Anterior-posterior standard deviation (APSD) data showed postural sway was only significantly reduced in the textured compared to the smooth condition in the bipedal stance, F(1, 27) = 5.84, p = 0.02, η2p = 0.18 (4.29 ± 1.32 mm vs. 4.8 ± 2.29 mm; mean difference of 0.51 mm, 95% CI: 0.076 to 0.935)
More focused simple main effect analyses on the bipedal data revealed postural sway was significantly less for the textured compared to smooth insole in the eyes closed (EC) condition, F(1, 27) = 4.68, p = 0.04, η2p =
Summary
Wearing a textured shoe insole can decrease postural sway during static balance. Previous studies assessed bipedal and/or unipedal standing. Wearing a textured insole (TI) in the shoe can decrease postural sway during static balance tasks [1, 2] in a range of populations, including: healthy older people [3, 4], people with Parkinson’s disease [5], multiple sclerosis [6], and even healthy young adults [4, 7]. Hatton and colleagues [4, 7] found advantages for a pyramidal compared to a concave textured floor pattern in young healthy adults and older people. Given these predominantly positive results, in healthy young adults, we compared the pyramidal to a smooth insole (control) in the current study
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