Study On Adaptive Balance For Ramp Gait Instability Based On Plantar Pressure

Carrying out adaptive balance research focused on slip is important to prevent slip injury. rehabilitation training design, walking assistive technology research and development design etc. Nowadays, many researches about instability have been done at home and abroad. However, the relationship between plantar pressure and gait parameters was still unclear, also didn’t know the adaptive balance reactions against slip destabilization during downhill. Base on above, the purpose of this study, focusing on gait instability phenomena caused by slip destabilization during downhill, was to explore the adaptive balance reactions of lower limb by means of plantar pressure and gait analysis.Ten health young men were recruited in this study. And each of them was required to complete downhill walking trials under dry or oil walking medium respectively (downhill slope was 0,1:12 and 1:10). Subjects needed to complete 10 times walking trials under each slope when the medium was dry and 5 times when the medium was oil. Each of subjects was instructed to walk naturally, look forward, and continue to walk when slip destabilization was exerted. Spatio-temporal gait, kinetic and kinematic paremeters during walking were collected and analyzed.Two hypotheses were proposed in this study based on the principle of bold hypothesis but careful verification. First, we assumed that there is a specific adaptive balance reactions suit for downhill at specific slope. Second, we assumed the relationship between the magnitude of adaptive reaction and the disturbance intensity is positive correlation, when downhill slope was treated as disturbance intensity. In order to verify the first hypothesis, ANOVA was used, dry trial as contrast, to analyze the changes of plantar pressure and gait parameters, and according to which to explore the adaptive balance reactions under specific slope. In order to verify the second hypothesis, ANOVA was used firstly and then regression analysis was done to obtain the relationship between the magnitude of reaction and disturbance intensity.The results showed that, the first hypothesis was established, that human has a series of adaptive balance reactions to avoid slip during downhill walking at a specific slope; the second hypothesis was established partly, namely there were linear relationships between most of the parameters(spatio-temporal gait parameters, time-normalized pressure-time integral, the pressure center track, vertical ground reaction force and the lower limb joint angles) and disturbance intensity during some particular gait periods, but the plantar peak pressure was not affected by disturbance intensity.