objectives: this study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a modified floor reaction ankle foot orthosis (frafo) design on gait performance in children with cerebral palsy. methods: eight children with cerebral palsy wore a modified frafo bilaterally for six weeks. motion analysis was used to assess the immediate effectiveness of the orthosis on improving gait and also following six w...

OBJECTIVES To describe the patterns of engagement in mental, physical, and social activity (MA, PA, and SA) and to examine the relationship between combined activity engagement and physical function among community-dwelling older adults. DESIGN Cross-sectional correlational study. SETTING Multiple communities. PARTICIPANTS A total of 466 individuals aged 55 years or older. MEASUREMENTS ...

In humans, physical performance declines with increasing age, and in nondisabled older persons, scores on standardized performance measures, such as walking speed, repeated chair stands, and a balance test, predict the incidence of disability and reduced longevity. Here we show in aged rats (24-month-old Brown Norway x Fischer 344 male rats; n = 48) that conceptually similar performance measure...

Most traffic accidents involving pedestrians happen during street crossing. Safe street crossing by older adults requires complex planning and imposes high cognitive demands. Understanding how street crossing situations affect younger and older adults' gait is important to create evidence-based policies, education and training. The objective of this study was to develop and test a method to eva...

Background. Approximately 35,000 strokes occur annually in adults below the age of 40, and there is disappointingly little data describing their responses to rehabilitation. The purpose of this analysis was to determine the effects of Poststroke Optimization of Walking using Explosive Resistance (POWER) training in young (<40 years) and older (>60 years) adults and to describe relationships bet...

Quantifying the effects of crosswalk length and signal timing on pedestrian walking speed is an important requirement for providing a rational safety assessment and improving existing operational policies at signalized intersections. This study investigates the effects of pedestrian green time (PG), crosswalk length and pedestrian crossing direction on pedestrian walking speed at signalized cro...

We have recently reported that the head systematically deviates toward the future direction of the trajectory about 500 ms before attaining a turning point of 90 degrees corner trajectories both in light and in darkness. Here, we investigated how this anticipatory strategy is modified whilst varying visual conditions (Experiment 1) and walking speed (Experiment 2). Exp. 1 showed similar anticip...

This study compared subjects' performance with a nonmicroprocessor knee mechanism (NMKM) versus a C-Leg on nine clinically repeatable evaluative measures. We recorded data on subjects' performance while they used an accommodated NMKM and, following a 90-day accommodation period, the C-Leg in a convenience sample of 19 transfemoral (TF) amputees (mean age 51 +/- 19) from an outpatient prosthetic...

We conducted eight experiments to examine how manipulating perception vs. action during walking affects perception-action recalibration in real and imagined blindfolded walking tasks. Participants first performed a distance estimation task (pretest), and then walked through an immersive virtual environment on a treadmill for 10 minutes. Participants then repeated the distance estimation task (p...

When walking in open space, collision avoidance with other pedestrians is a process that successfully takes place many times. To pass another pedestrian (an interferer) walking direction, walking speed or both can be adjusted. Currently, the literature is not yet conclusive of how humans adjust these two parameters in the presence of an interferer. This impedes the development of models predict...