Strategies of healthy adults walking on a laterally oscillating treadmill

Abstract

We mounted a treadmill on top of a six degree-of-freedom motion base platform to investigate locomotor responses produced by healthy adults introduced to a dynamic walking surface. The experiment examined self-selected strategies employed by participants when exposed to continuous, sinusoidal lateral motion of the support surface while walking. Torso translation and step width were used to classify responses used to stabilize gait in this novel, dynamic environment. Two response categories emerged. Participants tended to either fix themselves in space (FIS), allowing the treadbelt to move laterally beneath them, or fix themselves to the base (FTB), moving laterally as the motion base oscillated. The degree of fixation in both extremes varied across participants. This finding suggests that normal adults have innate and varied preferences for optimizing gait stability, some depending more heavily on vision (FIS group) and others on proprioception (FTB group).