ELISABETH GAGNON
In the summer of 2019 I volunteered at the Motion and Adaptation Science Laboratory at UHN where I conducted research on the best way to measure postural stability during walking. The study consisted of 14 males completing four walking conditions with different dynamic stabilities:
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Natural walking
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Walking in sync with a metronome
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Walking while performing the Stroop test
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Walking with arms restricted
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Kinetic data was captured using two force plates (left/right) located on the treadmill. Kinematic data was captured using motion capture and 20 different marker points. The desired and measured centre of pressure (COP) was calculated using the force plate and marker data. The stride interval was calculated from heel contact to heel contact of the same foot, using the force plate data. The COM acceleration was then found by taking the second derivative of the ankle marker positions.
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF COM ACCELERATION
Using the pairwise Wilcoxon Test and the Bonferroni correction, it was found that several comparisons were statistically significant when analyzing the mean peak values
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF dCOP-mCOP ALIGNMENT
Using the pairwise Wilcoxon Test and the Bonferroni correction, it was found that only the metronome-stroop comparision of the mean peak values was statistically significant
CONCLUSIONS
My research concluded with the COM acceleration being the best measure of dynamic stability during walking, as the statistical tests were able to differentiate between the different walking methods. Further steps are to test the extrapolated COM, a popular measure of dynamic stability.
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My summer researching provided me with the tools necessary to conduct my own tests in design processes and made me familiar with performing statistical analyses.
