2025 Theses Doctoral
Effects of Sensory Perturbations on Gait and Balance During Overground Walking
Standing and walking balance are complex tasks that involve detecting body motion andposition through sensory information from the visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems, integrating these inputs, and producing an appropriate neuromuscular response to maintain stability. Sensory information from these peripheral sensory organs, eyes, muscles, joints, and vestibular systems is integrated to create an accurate estimate of body movement and position. However, with age, injury, or disease, sensory input from these organs can become faulty or weakened, resulting in inaccurate perceptions of motion or rotational illusions that lead to dizziness, vertigo, instability, and falls.
Testing and treatment of balance impairments in patients typically involve assessing functional impairment by evaluating postural balance during challenging static and dynamic environmental conditions, such as using unstable platforms, balance boards, or when visual fields are occluded, blurred, or distorted. While robotic systems have been developed to measure postural balance in standing tasks, there remains a lack of studies that measure gait responses during sensory alterations.
Assessing and treating balance impairments in individuals with imbalance issues often involves evaluating postural balance under challenging static and dynamic conditions. These conditions may involve altering sensory input through unstable platforms while simultaneously occluding, blurring, or distorting visual fields. Although robotic systems have been developed to impose sensory perturbations and assess postural balance during standing tasks and treadmill walking, there is a gap in the literature when it comes to evaluating the effects of sensory alterations during overground walking.
This dissertation presents a collection of work that characterizes gait responses to different sensory alterations during overground walking. Using virtual reality, a robotic neck brace, and haptic vibration motors, this research investigates the gait responses of older adults and football players and extends research on vibrational vestibular perturbations during overground walking. The dissertation provides insights into age-related and sports-related changes in gait adaptations to sensory perturbations, as well as the effects of vibrational and visual perturbations during overground walking.
Chapter One offers an overview of current technologies and methods in balance assessment, highlighting the need to examine how gait and balance are affected by different sensory manipulations.
Chapter Two presents the design considerations and construction of the overground sensory manipulation setup while exploring the feasibility of using virtual reality (VR) for gait assessment.
Chapter Three investigates and compares the responses to visual, vestibular, and combined perturbations between football athletes and young healthy participants, focusing on differences in spatiotemporal gait parameters. Chapter Four explores how elderly individuals adapt to vestibular and visual perturbations during overground walking, in comparison to young healthy adults.
Chapter Five explores the effects of mastoid vibration on overground walking. It examines both continuous and gait-timed vibrations and their effects on temporal and spatial gait parameters and balance. Subjective measures of pain and discomfort due to the vibration are also measured.
Chapter Six further investigates vibration as a method to stimulate the vestibular system by comparing its effects on gait with robotically controlled head turns. Chapter Seven investigates how visual perturbations, such as shifts in the visual field, and vibrational simulations of the vestibular system interact and affect gait and balance.
The final chapter, Chapter Eight, presents a method of gait analysis that simplifies the process of gait analysis by reducing the number of variables. The study explores which key gait, balance, and subjective outcomes should be considered during sensory perturbation experiments.
This dissertation presents a sensory manipulation setup for overground gait assessment, designed to investigate how gait and balance are influenced by visual and vestibular perturbations. By systematically applying sensory disturbances, this research measures gait and balance adaptations in different populations, including athletes, older adults, and young healthy individuals. The findings highlight how various sensory manipulations impact balance and gait strategies across these groups. By comparing our results with earlier treadmill and postural response studies, this thesis offers valuable insights into how overground gait adjustments compare to or differ from existing postural or treadmill assessments.
Subjects
Files
This item is currently under embargo. It will be available starting 2027-01-08.
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Mechanical Engineering
- Thesis Advisors
- Agrawal, Sunil K.
- Degree
- Ph.D., Columbia University
- Published Here
- January 15, 2025