INTRODUCTION Anxiety has negative effects on the cognitive performance and psychosocial adjustment of elderly people. Given the high prevalence of anxiety symptoms in patients suffering from cognitive impairment, it has been suggested that these symptoms may be an early marker of dementia. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is one of the most widely-used scales for evaluating anxiety in e...

Previous research on the biomechanics of stair negotiation has ignored the effect of the approaching speed. We examined if initiating stair ascent with a comfortable self-selected speed can affect the lower-extremity joint moments and powers as compared to initiating stair ascent directly in front of the stairs. Healthy young adults ascended a custom-built staircase instrumented with force plat...

BACKGROUND People with low back pain (LBP) alter their motion patterns during level walking and stair climbing due to pain or fear. However, the alternations of load sharing during the two activities are largely unknown. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of LBP caused by lumbar disc herniation (LDH) on the muscle activities of 17 main trunk muscle groups and the intradis...

The ability to negotiate stairs is important for community access and independent mobility but requires more effort and strength than level walking. For this reason, previous attempts to utilize functional neuromuscular stimulation (FNS) to restore stair navigation after spinal cord injury (SCI) have had limited success and are not readily generalizable. Stair descent is particularly challengin...

Functional testing is particularly useful in the clinic and for making research translatable; however, finding measures relevant across ages and different conditions can be difficult. A systematic review was conducted to investigate timed stair tests as an objective measure of functional abilities and musculoskeletal integrity. Data were analyzed for their ability to differentiate between contr...

This paper presents a stair-climbing mobile platform built on the Rocker–Bogie mechanism which enables to effectively climb up/down various sizes of stairs in indoor environments without violating its mobile stability. First, the link parameters of Rocker–Bogie mechanism are optimally chosen via the Taguchi method in order to make the trajectory of its center of mass (CM) as smooth as possible,...

In a vertical evacuation, there are two types of route that could be chosen namely ramp and stair. A is usually used to help disabled person with wheelchair reach the top shelter stair for normal persons. However, in an speed very important. Therefore, comparison between use stairs terms evacuation should evaluated. This paper presents evaluation using ramps by The study found evacuating slight...

Background. Patellofemoral osteoarthritis (PF OA) is a leading cause of significant pain and disability of the knee joint. Stair climbing dysfunction is commonly reported in this cohort. Objectives. To compare the temporal muscle activation between females with PF OA and healthy controls during stair ascent and decide whether there is a link between altered core activity and Patellofemoral oste...

[Purpose] We investigated the difference in onset time between the vastus medialis and lateralis according to knee alignment during stair ascent and descent to examine the effects of knee alignment on the quadriceps during stair stepping. [Subjects] Fifty-two adults (20 with genu varum, 12 with genu valgum, and 20 controls) were enrolled. Subjects with > 4 cm between the medial epicondyles of t...

Walking up and down stairs is a common and important activity of daily living. Women with fibromyalgia often show a reduced ability to perform this task.The objective of this study was to evaluate the test-retest reliability of stair negotiation tasks and to assess the impact of fibromyalgia symptoms on the ability to negotiate stairs.Forty-two women with fibromyalgia participated in this descr...