The Effects of Muscle Fatigability on Gait Instability in Aging and Age-Related Falls Risk

项目摘要 福尔斯是一个严重的社会问题，具有巨大的物理和经济后果。随着年龄的增长， 与福尔斯风险增加相关的因素，如感觉、运动和认知运动的下降 敏锐度这些变化可能会影响我们如何补偿处于疲劳状态，以更好地导航动态 步行的挑战，由于额外的风险，他们把老年人在福尔斯。总体科学 这个奖学金提案的前提是，局部肌肉疲劳损害了神经肌肉控制， 步行平衡和不断沉淀步态不稳定的方向依赖性和特定的上下文 老年人的方式。该项目将招募30名年轻人，30名老年人，30名老年人 参加两个会议：一个旨在客观地针对肌肉的局部疲劳， 调节矢状面运动和稳定性，另一种设计用于客观地针对 调节冠状面运动和稳定性的肌肉。这个项目战略性地结合了复杂的 运动捕捉和肌电时频分析与创新的步行平衡套件 扰动旨在模拟现实世界的平衡挑战，以确定新的机械原因 增加福尔斯风险。这项研究将是第一个建立疲劳效应背后的机制， 步行稳定性通过使用定向局部肌肉疲劳性和全面的和特定的任务 步行平衡扰动与肌肉骨骼建模和模拟集成的集合。这一领域 机械和假设驱动的研究一直严重不足，但有显着的， 立即有可能在诊断、康复、移动的监测和可穿戴设备方面取得新的进展 减轻福尔斯摔倒的辅助技术。

PROJECT SUMMARY Falls are a severe societal issue with vast physical and economic consequences. As we age, there are a variety of factors that are associated with an increased falls risk such as declines in sensor, motor, and cognitive-motor acuity. These changes may affect how we compensate for being in a fatigued state to better navigate dynamic walking challenges due to the additional risks that they put older adults at for falls. The overarching scientific premise of this fellowship proposal is that local muscle fatigability compromises the neuromuscular control of walking balance and importunately precipitates gait instability in a direction-dependent and context-specific ways in older adults. This project will recruit 30 young adults, 30 older adult non-fallers, and 30 older adult fallers to participate in two sessions: one designed to objectively target the local fatigability of muscles that regulate sagittal plane motion and stability and another designed to objectively target the local fatigability of muscles that regulate coronal plane motion and stability. This project strategically combines sophisticated motion capture and electromyographic time-frequency analyses with an innovative suite of walking balance perturbations designed to emulate real-world balance challenges to identify novel mechanistic causes for increased falls risk. This research study will be the first to establish the mechanisms behind fatigues effect on walking stability through the usage of directional local muscle fatigability and a comprehensive and task specific collection of walking balance perturbations integrated with musculoskeletal modeling and simulations. This area of mechanistic and hypothesis-driven research has been severely understudied, but has significant and immediate potential to inform novel advances in diagnostics, rehabilitation, mobile monitoring, and wearable assistive technologies to mitigate falls.