Citation

Kang HG, Dingwell JB. Gait Posture 2006; 24(3): 386-390.

Affiliation

Nonlinear Biodynamics Lab, Department of Kinesiology and Health Education, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.gaitpost.2005.11.004

PMID

16413784

Abstract

While local dynamic stability measures have been successfully used to characterize walking stability, they require long continuous walking data, which may be difficult to obtain from a clinical population. We investigated the amount of walking data necessary to obtain reliable measures of local dynamic stability. Twenty healthy adults walked on a motorized treadmill at their self-selected speed for three trials of 5 min each. Trunk motion was used to construct a 12-dimensional state space comprised of the linear and angular positions and velocities. Mean divergence of locally perturbed trajectories was calculated as a measure of local dynamic stability using the first 1-5 min of data from each trial. Exponential divergence rates were quantified. Divergence was also parameterized using a double-exponential function. Intra-class correlation coefficients ICC(2,1) were calculated for each divergence measure for each trial length. ICC(2, 1) values increased with trial length, and reached 0.5-0.9. Good reliability was obtained for short-term measures for trial lengths of 2 and 3 min, but 5 min was not adequate to estimate the long-term coefficients based on a single trial.

Language: en