To facilitate stable walking, humans must generate appropriate motor patterns and effective corrective responses to perturbations. Yet most EMG analyses do not address the continuous nature of muscle activation dynamics over multiple strides. We compared muscle activation dynamics in young and older adults by defining a multivariate state space for muscle activity. Eighteen healthy older and 17...

OBJECTIVE Pathological gaits have been shown to limit transfer between potential (PE) and kinetic (KE) energy during walking, which can increase locomotor costs. The purpose of this study was to examine whether energy exchange would be limited in people with knee osteoarthritis (OA). METHODS Ground reaction forces during walking were collected from 93 subjects with symptomatic knee OA (self-s...

OBJECTIVE High-density electroencephelography (EEG) can provide an insight into human brain function during real-world activities with walking. Some recent studies have used EEG to characterize brain activity during walking, but the relative contributions of movement artifact and electrocortical activity have been difficult to quantify. We aimed to characterize movement artifact recorded by EEG...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to clarify the difference in gait parameters of at-home walking and the 10-meter walking test results of individuals with hemiparesis. [Subjects] A total of 14 hemiparetic stroke recovery patients participated in this study. Inclusion criteria were: living at home, the ability to walk independently, and demonstrated low extremity on recovery stages III-V ...

At night the Namib Desert spider Leucorchestris arenicola performs long-distance homing across its sand dune habitat. By disabling all or pairs of the spiders' eight eyes we found that homing ability was severely reduced when vision was fully abolished. Vision, therefore, seems to play a key role in the nocturnal navigational performances of L. arenicola. After excluding two or three pairs of e...

Gait hypokinesia (slowness) is a characteristic feature of Parkinson's disease. It is not clear, however, whether the slowness is due to a problem in regulation of the timing of consecutive steps or the control of stride size. Examination of cadence control for slow to medium walking speeds has shown an increase in step frequency that was a compensation for reduced stride length. In this invest...

Despite its common application and widely reported health benefits, walking, in relation to pace and intensity, is under-researched. Few studies have addressed whether people normally walk at a pace that meets the public health recommendations for moderate intensity physical activity (1.34-1.79 ms-1) and there is no known research on individuals' perceptions of factors which influence walking p...

INTRODUCTION This report presents a new imaging technique for non-invasive study of six degrees of freedom (DOF) knee kinematics during treadmill gait. MATERIALS AND METHODS A treadmill was integrated into a dual fluoroscopic imaging system (DFIS) to formulate a gait analysis system. To demonstrate the application of the system, a healthy subject walked on the treadmill at four different spee...

We examined whether self-ratings of "being active" among older people living in four different settings (major city high and lower density suburbs, a regional city, and a rural area) were associated with out-of-home participation and outdoor physical activity. A mixed-methods approach (survey, travel diary, and GPS tracking over a one-week period) was used to gather data from 48 individuals age...

BACKGROUND Due to the increasing occurrence of obesity and low physical activity (PA) reported in school children there is a need to investigate PA patterns of preschool children. Our aim was to identify the PA of preschool children in comparison to the PA of teenagers and young adults. METHODS PA of 104 Czech preschool children (aged 5-7 years), 1174 teenagers (aged 12-17 years) and 787 youn...