Design considerations for technology-assisted fall-resisting skills training trials in older adults: A pilot and feasibility study

Abstract

Training fall-resisting skills can prevent falls in older adults. These fall-resisting skills include proactive gait adaptability, gait robustness, and reactive gait recovery, which allow people to effectively avoid, resist, and recover from balance threats, respectively. This pilot study guided the design of an RCT of fall-resisting skills training by investigating key design factors, such as the design of a placebo-control group, obstacle difficulty settings, exploring evaluation methods for gait robustness, testing the effect of task unpredictability on anxiety, and the general feasibility. Eleven healthy older adults performed non-task-specific "placebo" balance tasks and assessment and training tasks for each fall-resisting skill. Placebo tasks included static weight-shifting exercises and dual-task walking. For the fall-resisting skill tasks, participants walked on a treadmill under different conditions. For proactive gait adaptability, participants avoided projected obstacles varying in size, approach speed, and available response time. Gait robustness was assessed using perturbations of increasing magnitude, where the margin of stability following each perturbation was compared with participants' perceived balance loss and researchers' observations. For reactive gait recovery, perturbations with increasing unpredictability were applied, after which participants reported their anxiety scores. Weight-shifting tasks were perceived as balance training by most participants, indicating their potential as placebo tasks. Obstacle avoidance difficulty increased most with fast approach speed and large obstacle sizes. A margin of stability-based threshold did not consistently align with perceived balance loss or observer judgement. Anxiety did not increase with more unpredictable perturbation tasks when introduced gradually. Fall-resisting skill tasks generally were feasible for older adults.