For servicemembers who have sustained amputations and wish to return to Active Duty, performing common military tasks is essential. The purpose of this study was to examine the metabolic requirements of servicemembers with transtibial amputations wearing a loaded rucksack and walking at a steady speed. We tested 12 servicemembers with unilateral transtibial amputations and 12 uninjured controls...

OBJECTIVE Measures of walking ability in large clinical trials are usually limited to a timed short-distance walk and the distance walked in a fixed time. A new integrated system of 5 accelerometers was tested for reliability and compared to a footswitch system to determine if the accelerometers offered a practical option for the acquisition of spatiotemporal gait parameters. METHODS Leg acce...

BACKGROUND Minimum toe clearance is a critical gait event because it coincides with peak forward velocity of the swing foot, and thus, there is an increased risk of tripping and falling. Trans-tibial amputees have increased risk of tripping compared to able-bodied individuals. Assessment of toe clearance during gait is thus clinically relevant. In able-bodied gait, minimum toe clearance increas...

Spatio-temporal gait characteristics (step and stride length, stride frequency, duty factor) were determined for the hind-limb cycles of nine bonobos (Pan paniscus) walking quadrupedally and bipedally at a range of speeds. The data were recalculated to dimensionless quantities according to the principle of dynamic similarity. Lower leg length was used as the reference length. Interindividual va...

An understanding of the evolution of human bipedalism can provide valuable insights into the biomechanical and physiological characteristics of locomotion in modern humans. The walking gaits of humans, other bipeds and most quadrupedal mammals can best be described by using an inverted-pendulum model, in which there is minimal change in flexion of the limb joints during stance phase. As a resul...

This study examined differences in accelerometer output when subjects walked on level ground and on a treadmill. We asked 25 nondisabled participants to wear an RT3 triaxial accelerometer (StayHealthy, Inc; Monrovia, California) and walk at their "normal" and "brisk" walking speeds for 10 minutes. These activities were repeated on a treadmill using the individual speeds from level-ground walkin...

This study examined differences in accelerometer output when subjects walked on level ground and on a treadmill. We asked 25 nondisabled participants to wear an RT3 triaxial accelerometer (StayHealthy, Inc; Monrovia, California) and walk at their “normal” and “brisk” walking speeds for 10 minutes. These activities were repeated on a treadmill using the individual speeds from level-ground walkin...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to develop a generalized equation to predict VO2 during level treadmill walking in young boys and girls. METHODS On an annual basis from ages 6 to 10, 23 able-bodied children (14 girls, 9 boys) completed six 5-min walking bouts at speeds ranging from 40.2 to 107.2 m x min(-1). Before testing, each child received 60 min of treadmill walking practice. Durin...

BACKGROUND Force-sensing split-belt treadmills (TMs) provide an alternative to the conventional overground (OG) setting and allow new avenues for analyzing the biomechanics and motor control of walking. However, walking control may differ on a TM compared with walking OG. OBJECTIVE To compare spatiotemporal, kinematic, and EMG-based measures of motor control between TM and OG walking at self-...

Changes in behavioral state modify neural activity in many systems. In some vertebrates such modulation has been observed and interpreted in the context of attention and sensorimotor coordinate transformations. Here we report state-dependent activity modulations during walking in a visual-motor pathway of Drosophila. We used two-photon imaging to monitor intracellular calcium activity in motion...