Humans need adaptive control of dynamic balance to remain upright during walking in reaction to constant in- and external perturbations of gait.
Adaptive control of dynamic balance decreases after natural aging or disease, with reduced mobility and increased fall risk as a result.
To better understand these processes, adaptive control of dynamic balance was studied in healthy humans and people post-stroke.
Adaptive control of dynamic balance played a key role in successful locomotion and in locomotor (re-)learning, which indicates that learning to walk is learning to adaptively control dynamic balance.
Adaptive control of dynamic balance plays a key role in locomotor control and learning. The latter was stressed by showing that handrail holding dramatically reduces long-term locomotor learning, which should be taken into account in daily clinical practice.
Furthermore, this work showed a maladaptive coupling between the sagittal and frontal plane paretic reactive stepping post-stroke. Further research should indicate whether this maladaptive coupling increases fall-risk and whether it can be decoupled through gait training.
> From: Buurke, IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 27 (2019) 1753-1759 . All rights reserved to IEEE. Click here for the online summary.
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