Deans' stroke musings: Measures of gait stability: performance on adults and toddlers at the beginning of independent walking

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Measures of gait stability: performance on adults and toddlers at the beginning of independent walking

I would think that your doctor and therapist should be objectively evaluating your gait stability prior to discharge.
http://www.jneuroengrehab.com/content/11/1/131/abstract

Maria Cristina Bisi, Federico Riva and Rita Stagni

Author Affiliations

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Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2014, 11:131 doi:10.1186/1743-0003-11-131
Published: 3 September 2014

Abstract (provisional)

Background

Quantifying gait stability is a topic of high relevance and a number of possible measures have been proposed. The problem in validating these methods is the necessity to identify a-priori unstable individuals. Since proposed methods do not make any assumption on the characteristics of the subjects, the aim of the present study was to test the performance of gait stability measures on individuals whose gait is a-priori assumed unstable: toddlers at the onset of independent walking.

Methods

Ten toddlers, ten adults and ten elderly subjects were included in the study. Data from toddlers were acquired longitudinally over a 6-month period to test if the methods detected the increase in gait stability with experience, and if they could differentiate between toddlers and young adults. Data from elderly subjects were expected to indicate a stability value in between the other two groups. Accelerations and angular velocities of the trunk and of the leg were measured using two tri-axial inertial sensors. The following methods for quantifying gait stability were applied: stride time variability, Poincare plots, harmonic ratio, short term Lyapunov exponents, maximum Floquet multipliers, recurrence quantification analysis and multiscale entropy. An unpaired t-test (level of significance of 5%) was performed on the toddlers and the young adults groups for each method and, for toddlers, for each evaluated stage of gait development.

Results

Methods for discerning between the toddler and the adult groups were: stride time variability, Poincare plots, harmonic ratio, short term Lyapunov exponents (state space composed by the three linear acceleration of the trunk), recurrence quantification analysis and multiscale entropy (when applied on the vertical or on the antero-posterior L5 accelerations).

Conclusions

Results suggested that harmonic ratio and recurrence quantification analysis (What's this?) better discern gait stability in the analyzed subjects, differentiating not only between unstable toddlers and stable healthy adults but also evidencing the expected trend of the toddlers towards a higher stability with walking experience, and indicating elderly subjects as stable as or less stable than young adults.