Original articleThe Reliability of Spatiotemporal Gait Data for Young and Older Women During Continuous Overground Walking
Section snippets
Participants
Thirteen young and 14 older women volunteered to participate in the study. Group characteristics are displayed in table 1. The wider age range for the older sample reflects the ages commonly investigated for gait changes in the literature. This higher range is not expected to influence the outcomes of the study given a within-subject design has been used to investigate the reliability of 2 different walking protocols. Women were chosen because of the higher incidence of falls and fall-related
Reliability of Single and Continuous Walking Trials
All data exhibited normality because skewness and kurtosis values fell within the normative range. Mean difference and SD values were consistent with previously reported values (table 2). The SE of measurement, CV, and ICCs were used to examine the reliability of each of the gait variables (see table 2).
In the single walking trial condition, heteroscedasticity was found in 2 (15%) of 13 gait variables for the younger participants and 8 (62%) of 13 for the older participants. In the continuous
Discussion
This study investigated the test-retest reliability of spatiotemporal gait data recorded during steady-state walking by using single and continuous walking trial protocols. In general, the spatiotemporal gait data were found to be reliable for both conditions. Interestingly, there was also some evidence of systematic bias across the test sessions for many of the spatiotemporal variables, with the majority of the bias occurring for the single walking trial condition. This suggests that a
Conclusions
Measuring changes in walking requires an instrument and data-collection protocol that provides accurate results over repeat test sessions. This study found both the single and continuous overground walking conditions to be reliable collection methods for gait data. There was, however, some evidence of systematic bias between the sessions. More bias was found for trials in which participants performed repeated single walks than when the same amount of information was collected from continuous
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2016, Gait and PostureCitation Excerpt :In contrast, absolute reliability statistics are not affected by these sample characteristics; therefore, the discussion will focus on the absolute reliability findings. Similar studies who have examined the reliability of gait variability and dealt with issues of limited range data have also reported absolute reliability [7,27–29]. Younger adults had smaller absolute differences compared to older adults in all gait variability parameters.
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2016, Gait and PostureCitation Excerpt :Our agreement results were comparable or even better than those reported by prior studies assessing healthy young adults during level walking at normal velocities (4–5 km/h) [13,25,26]. Indeed, SDCs ranging between 4.4 and 9.4 cm were observed for step length, 2.0 and 3.2 cm for step width, 2.7 and 4.5° for foot rotation, 9.4 and 11.8 steps/min for cadence, 2.8% for SLS, 0.03 and 0.07 s for step time, 53 and 67 N for HF, 50 and 75 N for TF, and 2.8% for THF and TTF [13,25,26]. According to the benchmark proposed by Terwee et al. [20] (ICC > 0.70 with lower limit of CI > 0.60), reliability was low at slow gait speeds (2–3 km/h), during uphill walking for step length, cadence and step time, and under almost all conditions for THF and TTF.
Instrumenting gait with an accelerometer: A system and algorithm examination
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