Objective: To investigate the relationship between cognition and motion skills, through an innovative technological tool able to quantify gait parameters, while providing for a Motor and Cognitive Dual-Task.

Background: Although gait has been traditionally considered as an automatic motor activity, which does not require significant control from cortical structures and high cognitive process, it has been recently rethought as a complex task that involves several cognitive abilities. These insights occurred from the increased use of Cognitive and Motor Dual-Task paradigms, by the growing interest in the use of wearable sensors.

Method: 8 healthy controls (HC), 16 MCI patients (9 p-MCI and 7 np-MCI) were instrumented with a wearable inertial sensor placed on the dominant foot (SensorFootV2) [Figure 1]. Participants were asked to complete 30 minutes of normal-paced walking, while they have to perform a task, which engage the sustained attention ability. Subjects were requested to hear a repeated acoustic signal and to detect tone variations in that sequence. In correspondence of tone changing, the subjects should reply with a precise movement of the hip joint [1]. Inertial signal processing in spatiotemporal domain allowed to extract 8 kinematic parameters, i.e. number of steps, stride, stance swing, relative stance, angular acceleration, cadency. Mann-Whitney U test was applied to distinguish between p-MCI and np-MCI. Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted to outline differences among the two MCI groups and the HOA groups. Furthermore, a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was applied to underline the similarity and differences among the three groups.

Results: Subjects with different cognitive profile, n-MCI and np-MCI, show significant differences in relevant gait parameters. Particularly, the results of this research show a significant statistical difference between MCI with and without planning impairment.

Conclusion: This study aims to shed light on the relationship between motor and cognitive sphere, by adopting a neuroscientific-based standpoint. For this reason, we adopt alternative criteria for MCI characterization, defined on the basis of latter neuroimaging studies on the combination of cognitive and motor activity to better address the topic.

References: [1] Zimmermann, P., & Fimm, B. (1995). Test battery for attention performance (TAP). Psytest, Wuerselen, Germany.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/a-neuroscientific-approach-for-mci-characterization-using-a-motor-and-cognitive-dual-task/