TY - JOUR PY - 2023// TI - Adaptive walking assistance does not impact long-range stride-to-stride autocorrelations in healthy people JO - Journal of Neurophysiology A1 - Otlet, Virginie A1 - Ronsse, Renaud SP - ePub EP - ePub VL - ePub IS - ePub N2 - Many studies have demonstrated in the past that the level of long-range autocorrelations in series of stride durations, characterizing natural gait variability, is impacted by external constraints, such as treadmill or metronome, or by pathologies, such as Parkinson's or Huntington's disease. Nevertheless, no one has analyzed the effects on this metric of a gait constrained by a robot-mediated walking assistance, which intrinsically tends to normalize the gait pattern. This paper focuses on the influence of a wearable active pelvis orthosis on the level of long-range autocorrelations in series of stride durations. Ten healthy participants, aged between 55 and 77 years, performed four overground walking sessions, wearing this orthosis, and with different assistive parameters. This study showed that the adaptive assistance provided by this device has the potential of improving gait metrics that are typically affected by aging, such as the hip range of motion, walking speed, stride length and duration, without impacting natural gait variability, i.e. the level of long-range autocorrelations in series of stride durations. This combination is virtuous towards the design of an assistive device for people with locomotion disorders resulting in deteriorated levels of long-range autocorrelations, such as patients with Parkinson's disease.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 0022-3077 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00181.2023 ID - ref1 ER -