Objective: To determine the usability of the Interactive Walkway (IWW) for the assessment of walking adaptability.

Background: A prerequisite for safe walking is one’s ability to adapt walking to environmental circumstances, termed walking adaptability. Patients with a reduced walking adaptability are more likely to experience walking-related falls. Therefore, it is important to include walking adaptability in a comprehensive assessment of walking ability. The IWW is developed for an overground assessment of walking and walking adaptability. The IWW is a 10-meter walkway equipped with multiple integrated Kinect v2 sensors for markerless 3D motion registration, a set-up which has recently been validated for quantitative gait assessments against a gold standard (Geerse et al., 2015). To evoke step responses to environmental context, the IWW uses a projector to present gait-dependent visual context on the walkway, such as obstacles, based on real-time processed Kinect data. The so-obtained gait-environment interactions enable an assessment of walking adaptability.

Methods: A heterogeneous group of 21 healthy participants performed various assessments of walking adaptability (i.e., obstacle avoidance, sudden stops and starts and targeted stepping). Body points’ time series were recorded with the IWW and the gold-standard Optotrak system, from which multiple outcome measures were derived (i.e., margins, available response time, initiation time, stepping accuracy and walking speed). Furthermore, success and failure for obstacle-avoidance and sudden-stop tasks were documented. The main study outcomes were absolute between-systems agreement and the sensitivity to task variation for these dependent variables.

Results: Overall, the between-systems agreement was good to excellent (intraclass correlation coefficients for absolute agreement > 0.6). Success and failure ratings agreed for 89% to 97% of the trials. All dependent variables were sensitive to task variations (e.g., margins varied with obstacle size).

Conclusions: Dependent variables of walking adaptability assessments matched well between systems and were sensitive to task variations. Given that Kinect-based 3D motion registration is markerless and hence time efficient and patient friendly, we consider the IWW promising for obtaining task-specific examinations of one’s ability to walk that may be feasible for patients with a variety of gait disorders.

« Back to 2016 International Congress

MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/the-interactive-walkway-towards-assessing-gait-environment-interactions-in-a-clinical-setting/