The change of gait parameters during walking at different percentage of preferred walking speed for healthy adults aged 20–60 years
Introduction
A successful locomotion needs the integration of different physiological systems, and therefore many factors have influence on gait performance. Previous studies indicated that slower walking speed in elderly subjects may be associated with the decreased joint movements and joint kinetics [1], [2], biomechanical changes [3], and choosing “cautious” gait strategy [4]. The intrinsic characteristics between genders can influence the gait performance as well, such as skeletal alignment, muscle strength, and body size. The above information reveals that both physical and psychological factors can contribute to the individual differences in gait performance among different age and gender groups. These individual differences should not be ignored when evaluating the walking speed effect on gait performance.
Recent researches proposed the use of percentage of preferred walking speed (PPWS) to specify walking speed, because it offers the advantages of allowing comparisons between speeds, and simultaneously allowing the subjects to act their own control that can successfully normalize the gait parameters for age and physical factors [5], [6]. Given that PPWS is an effective method to normalize the gait parameters for age and physical factors, it is hypothesized that when subjects walking at a range of their PPWS, their gait pattern change should be similar. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate whether subjects of different age and gender groups will have the similar gait patterns during walking at a range of PPWS.
Several parameters are used to characterize the gait performance, such as joint motion, muscle electromyography (EMG), ground reaction force (GRF), heart rate (HR), and perceived exertion. Previous studies reported that some gait performance measurements are correlated to the physiological and psychophysical measures [7], [8], [9]. For example, Noble et al. [7] indicated that the perceived exertion generally follows HR response, and local muscular discomfort at higher walking speed was considered as the factor responsible for the earlier perceptual intersection. Anderson and Pandy [8] reported that the soleus and gastrocnemius muscles made the largest contribution to support accounting for 50–95% of the VGRFs generated in stance. Moreover, Takahashi et al. [9] demonstrated that VGRF is correlated with many gait parameters and functional performance. However, reports regarding the relationship between these parameters when evaluating the effects of age, gender and walking speed on gait performance are scarce. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of age, gender and walking speed on different gait performance measures including joint motion, GRF, EMG, HR, and perceived exertion during walking at different PPWS.
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirty healthy males and females aged between 20 and 60 years participated in this study. The subjects were divided into three age groups: young group (younger than 30 years), middle group (31–45 years), and older group (older than 45 years). These subjects were volunteers from students and staffs in a university, and all participants signed a written informed consent form. None of the subjects suffered from any neurological or musculoskeletal disorders.
Experimental design
A nested-factorial analysis of variance
Preferred walking speed
The means of the PWS and some reference information are summarized in Table 1. The age effect on PWS was significant (p < 0.05), and the results of Duncan's post-hoc testings indicate that the young (114.0 cm/s) and middle (111.8 cm/s) age groups had significantly higher PWS than the older group (94.7 cm/s) for both genders. In addition, the PWS was correlated significantly with age (r = −0.65, p < 0.01) and cadence (r = 0.55, p < 0.01), but no significant correlation with gender, height, BMI, and the lower
Age effect
Our findings show that the PWS decrease with the increase of age for both genders. Many previous studies indicated that both physical and psychological factors contributed to the slower PWS for elderly subjects [1], [2], [3], [4]. For the age 20–60 years adults, our results indicate that the age effect was not significant on joint motion, VGRF, HR, as well as the RPE scores in whole body and nine local areas, except for muscle EMG. Older group had significantly higher muscle activity in RF than
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