| Description |
Persons with Parkinson disease (PD) are at risk for fall-related injuries as 60-80% of persons with PD fall annually. Basic treadmill training among other forms of exercise are used to combat the motor symptoms of the disease which help to precipitate the falls, however, such training often fails to prepare its patients to be able to navigate through more challenging environments. In order to improve upon this deficiency in training regimes, virtual reality (VR) has more recently been used to boost effectiveness. The University of of Utah Treadport Active Wind Tunnel has been used for such VR rehabilitation in the past and current work is being done to improve upon the system. Therefore the purpose of this study was to characterize the gait of this fall-prone population on a combination of irregular surface and cross-slope conditions in order to accomplish the following goals: 1) Inform the general scientific community of the specific challenges that such environments present to those with PD so that such issues might be addressed during fall-prevention rehabilitation sessions in order to improve their effectiveness; 2) Provide biomechanical data that will be used to verify the ecological validity of the new VR training environment being created in the Treadport for use in PD rehabilitation research. The results of this study included that surface rather than slope was shown to have a more significant effect on the gait parameters of focus (i.e., spatiotemporal measures, lower limb kinematics, and trunk stability measures). Specific gait changes exhibited by the participants with PD (on a 0 degree slope) included the following: 1) adoption of more conservative step patterns, 2) significant changes in the range of motion across all lower limbs joints (while only the ankle was affected in the case of the control group), and 3) increased trunk center of mass (COM) acceleration variability in all directions (suggesting a challenge to stability in all planes of motion). In the case of surface effect on gait when on a 10 degree cross-slope, the overall stability of the participants was more threatened than by the surface effect on the 0 degree slope. |
