Automatic gait EVENT detection in older adults during perturbed walking.
Shuaijie Wang, Kazi Shahrukh Omar, Fabio Miranda and 1 others
PMID 40022199WHAT IT FOUND
Automatic marker and angle models detected foot touchdown and liftoff during lab slips and trips in healthy older adults; over 92% of touchdown events were within 50 ms.
This is a measurement method, not evidence that fall risk can be judged in patients.
Key findings
01All models detected touchdown and liftoff events with mean error under 21 ms; over 92% of touchdown events and over 93% of liftoff events were within 50 ms.
02The marker-based model had the smallest touchdown error, 13.6 ms, and detected 97% of touchdown events within 50 ms.
03For liftoff, the marker and angle models had smaller errors than the force-plate model, and the marker model detected 98.9% of events within 50 ms.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
The models were tested only in healthy older adults, not in patients with stroke, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, or other gait disorders. Detection was evaluated only for the left limb, which took the first compensatory step after slips and trips; performance for the right limb was not tested. The trials were controlled laboratory perturbations with force plates, motion capture, and a safety harness, so accuracy may not transfer to real-world walking or clinic devices. The paper reports gait-event detection accuracy, not fall risk, injury, or patient outcomes. Some models produced large error variability because extra peaks were detected, especially in slip trials with aborted stepping. Force-plate inputs were limited to steps that landed on the plates; other steps were not analysed. The supplied text describes development and testing on one NIH project dataset, not validation in a separate population or laboratory.
Declared interests
The article lists NIH extramural research support and says participants came from an ongoing NIH project, NCT03199729. The supplied text does not include a competing-interests declaration or state that the funder designed, analysed, or wrote the report.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the high detection accuracy as evidence that this method can assess fall risk or guide therapy in patients. It was validated only on healthy older adults in controlled lab slips and trips, and only for the left limb, so it does not show what it would do in your caseload.