Augmenting locomotor perception by remapping tactile foot sensation to the back.
Atena Fadaei Jouybari, Nathanael Ferraroli, Mohammad Bouri and 3 others
PMID 38678291WHAT IT FOUND
Healthy walkers felt back vibrations as their own movement when timing matched, even after a full step-cycle delay.
Stride timing showed no clear change, so this is a perception finding, not a tested gait treatment.
Key findings
01Participants gave high awareness ratings for non-delayed feedback (85 ± 3%) and full-cycle delayed feedback (78 ± 4%), and lowest ratings for half-cycle left-right reversed feedback (22 ± 6%).
02For remapped tactile walking feedback, the average delay at which participants judged feedback as their own 50% of the time was 378 ± 239 ms.
03Walking adaptation was limited: stride-time deviation did not differ significantly across delays.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
Only 26 healthy adults were analysed, so the results do not show effects in people with gait or sensory disorders. Three participants were excluded from the main awareness analysis, and temporal thresholds could be extracted for only 20 participants. Participants still felt their actual foot strikes, so the back vibration was not the only tactile input and may have conflicted with it. The main gait analysis did not show a significant effect of delay on stride-time deviation, so automatic gait adaptation is not established. Trials lasted 7 s and averaged 6.3 step-cycles, so long-term walking and carryover effects are unknown.
Declared interests
The supplied declaration names funding from the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung and does not report author competing interests.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the high awareness ratings as proof that the device helps patients walk better. The study tested healthy adults, and the main gait analysis did not show a significant effect of feedback delay on stride-time deviation.