Abstract
Injuries related with falls are a major health risk for the elderly. Accurate evaluation of the dynamic walking stability of elderly people is the key to fall prevention. A two-dimensional (2-D) model is proposed in this study given that the custom method is mainly focused on the dynamic walking stability along the antero-posterior axis. An inverted pendulum model was utilised to calculate the region of stability at toe-off, and stability conditions were evaluated first along the antero-posterior and medio-lateral axes. The analysis was then extended to the 2-D plane. In the 2-D case, the region of stability was determined based on the use of the information of the envelope of the foot. Twenty-four female participants, categorised as healthy young, healthy elderly, and elderly with a history of falls, were examined. Significant differences among the three groups were demonstrated with the 2-D analysis method, but not in the antero-posterior or medio-lateral analyses. The centre-of-masses of elderly fallers were significantly closer to the foot-supporting boundary compared with that of healthy young and elderly adults at toe-off. A 2-D analysis method using the envelope-of-foot could evaluate the dynamic stability of elderly females based on a more accurate scale.
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11772037), Key R&D projects in Shanxi Province (No. 201903D321167), the National Key R&D Programme of China (No. 2018YFC2001400), and Beijing Academy of Science and Technology Budding Project (No. BGS201913).
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Xing GAO and Fei SHEN are authors contributed to the work equally and should be regarded as co-first authors.
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GAO, X., SHEN, F., WANG, L. et al. Two-dimensional dynamic walking stability of elderly females with a history of falls. Med Biol Eng Comput 59, 1575–1583 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-021-02410-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-021-02410-1