The effect of habituation on differences in energy cost between overground and treadmill walking in typically developing children

How does a systematic tuning protocol for ankle foot orthosis–footwear combinations affect gait in children in cerebral palsy?

“…Finally, due to practical reasons and time constraints, conditions were not imposed in a randomised order and the protocol always started with the barefoot condition. Therefore, effects of habituation to treadmill walking or incremented heel height might have affected our results, although we expect these effects to be relatively small [40].…”

“…may complicate translation of our effects to daily life overground walking, since AFOs influence walking speed [36]. Another aspect of treadmill walking is that there are potential differences to overground walking [37][38][39][40]. To investigate whether and how treadmill walking may influence the effect of AFO-FC tuning, a pilot study was conducted before implementation of the protocol in clinical routine.…”