Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Motti Ader, Lilian Genaro
• Greene, Barry R.
• McManus, Killian
• Caulfield, Brian

Titel

Reliability of inertial sensor based spatiotemporal gait parameters for short walking bouts in community dwelling older adults

Ist Teil von

• Gait & posture, 2021-03, Vol.85, p.1-6

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Short walking bouts enable gait assessment in community dwelling older adults.•Quantified gait measures can be obtained from three gait cycles of bilateral data.•Gait variability and asymmetry can be assessed from at least six gait cycles.•Gait analysis from body-worn inertial sensors should report number of gait cycles.•The analysis of short bouts of gait data should be reported along with full trial. When performing quantitative analysis of gait in older adults we need to strike a balance between capturing sufficient data for reliable measurement and avoiding issues such as fatigue. The optimal bout duration is that which contains sufficient gait cycles to enable a reliable and representative estimate of gait performance. How does the number of gait cycles in a walking bout influence reliability of spatiotemporal gait parameters measured using body-worn inertial sensors in a cohort of community dwelling older adults? One hundred and fifteen (115) community dwelling older adults executed three 30-metre walk trials in a single measurement session. Bilateral gait data were collected using two inertial sensors attached to each participant’s right and left shank, and gait events detected from the medio-lateral angular velocity signal. The number of gait cycles selected from each walking trial was varied from 3 to 16. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC(2,k)) were calculated to evaluate the reliability of each spatiotemporal gait parameter according to the number of gait cycles included in the analysis. The specified algorithm and the clipping procedure for extracting short bouts of gait data seem appropriate for assessing older adults, providing reliable spatiotemporal measures from three gait cycles (three strides per leg) and good reliability for most parameters describing gait variability and gait asymmetry after six gait cycles (six strides per leg). A combination of using bilateral sensor data and adaptive thresholds for gait event detection enable reliable measures of spatiotemporal gait parameters over short walking bouts (minimum six gait cycles) in community dwelling older adults. This opens new possibilities in the use of wearable sensors in gait assessment based on short walking tasks. We recommend the number of gait cycles should be reported along with the calculated measures as reference values.