Self-paced versus fixed speed treadmill walking

Abstract

Instrumented treadmills are increasingly used in gait research, although the imposed walking speed is suggested to affect gait performance. A feedback-controlled treadmill that allows subjects to walk at their preferred speed, i.e. functioning in a self-paced (SP) mode, might be an attractive alternative, but could disturb gait through accelerations of the belt. We compared SP with fixed speed (FS) treadmill walking, and also considered various feedback modes. Nineteen healthy subjects walked on a dual-belt instrumented treadmill. Spatio-temporal, kinematic and kinetic gait parameters were derived from both the average stride patterns and stride-to-stride variability. For 15 out of 70 parameters significant differences were found between SP and FS. These differences were smaller than 1cm, 1°, 0.2 Nm and 0.2 W/kg for respectively stride length and width, joint kinematics, moments and powers. Since this is well within the normal stride variability, these differences were not considered to be clinically relevant, indicating that SP walking is not notably affected by belt accelerations. The long-term components of walking speed variability increased during SP walking (43%, p<0.01), suggesting that SP allows for more natural stride variability. Differences between SP feedback modes were predominantly found in the timescales of walking speed variability, while the gait pattern was similar between modes. Overall, the lack of clinically significant differences in gait pattern suggests that SP walking is a suitable alternative to fixed speed treadmill walking in gait analysis.

Reliability of a feedback-controlled treadmill algorithm dependent on the user's behavior

“…The proposed algorithm acknowledges and expands on the benefits of the previous [2], [11], [13]. Rather than strictly using the position of the individual on the treadmill, our algorithm is primarily dependent on biomechanical factors (i.e.…”

Implementation of feature extraction methods and support vector machine for classification of partial body weight supports in overground robot-aided walking

“…The SVM models are evaluated according to three dimensions, namely: accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, since they present distinct information about the classifier performance [2], [4].…”

“…In this sense, body weight support (BWS) are commonly used during walking rehabilitation and can be combined with wearable robot (WR) to provide safe ambulation and support in overground locomotion [1], [2].…”

Analytical model for computing translational and rotational angular momentum occurring in treadmill walking

“…A main direction in the human motion analysis is to describe the dynamic parameters associated to human gait. There are studies showing that dynamic parameters such as the reaction forces and moments were measured based on treadmill belts equipped with force sensors [8,[10][11][12][13][14] but only few are focused on computing dynamical parameters of the gait, starting from the kinematical measured parameters [9]. Some other authors applied nonlinear analysis to the flexion-extension movements of the human knee both on healthy and osteoarthritic individuals, observing the increasing of Largest Lyapunov Exponents for the OA patients with respect to healthy subjects [15,16].…”