Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: One-third of older adults over 65 years of age fall each year. Falls are the main cause of injury and death among this population. Understanding the causes of falling is therefore a necessity for gerontologists. Gait accelerometry is an important approach for the quantitative assessment of human walking. It is an inexpensive, portable and reliable method to measure trunk accelerations. The latter may give indications on balance control even though there is no agreed measure of it. Accelerometry requires the measured accelerations to be preprocessed, but previous studies have not studied thoroughly its effects on signal features. We therefore constituted a set of features in the time, frequency and time-frequency domains and we evaluated the impact of tilt correction and wavelet denoising - two pre-processing operations - on these features. Signals used in this thesis were collected on 35 participants aged 65-year-old and over: 14 were healthy controls (HC), 10 had Parkinson's disease (PD) and 11 had peripheral neuropathy (PN). They walked on a treadmill at preferred speed. We first applied tilt correction and wavelet denoising separately, then we applied operations one after another. Denoising had nearly no effect on features compared to the raw accelerations. Tilt correction led to better discrimination between groups. Joint pre-processing operations showed trends that were similar to the tilt correction alone. Older adults also face increasing difficulties to perform an activity during walking and this threatens their stability. Thus, during another trial, the same groups of subjects were asked to press a button at hearing a tone. We observed the impact of dual-tasking on the features. Several features such as Lempel-Ziv complexity, bandwidth of accelerations and harmonic ratios remained unaffected by dual-task walking while the remaining features were affected. We also examined the impact of dual-tasking on each group. Task differences were almost the same for every group and revealed lower harmonic ratios during dual-task walking.
Author: Alexandre Millecamps
Language: English
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W10700429