On the Costs and Benefits of Asymmetry during Healthy and Pathological Gait.

Walking is one of the many skills that we learn during development through trial-and-error practice. We eventually gain the ability to not only walk with little effort over flat, unobstructed terrain, but we also learn to adapt our walking pattern to changes in the environment or changes in the body that result from aging or disease. What factors govern the strategies that we choose during these forms of adaptive learning? Likely candidates include a combination of features related to effort, instability, aesthetics, and fear of falling. The relative weighting of these objectives impacts not only how we adapt our walking pattern when features of our environment change, but it also dictates how our preferred movement strategies change when there is damage to the nervous system, as is the case following a stroke. Here, I will summarize our recent work to understand the trade-offs between two primary objectives in human walking: effort minimization and minimizing fall risk. Through a combination of empirical studies and biomechanical simulations, I will show that asymmetric walking patterns can, in certain contexts, be considered optimal with respect to effort and balance-related costs for both healthy individuals and people post-stroke. I will conclude by making a case for a more personalized approach to identifying targets for locomotor rehabilitation, one that relies on predictions of optimal movement patterns given the constraints imposed by the neuromuscular system.

Dr. James Finley is an Associate Professor in the Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Southern California. Dr. Finley and his research team in the Locomotor Control Lab at USC use experimental studies and computational models to understand how mobility is controlled in healthy individuals and individuals with neuromotor impairments such as stroke and Parkinson’s disease. This work relies on principles of engineering, neuroscience, game design, biomechanics, and exercise physiology to ultimately design more effective interventions to improve mobility. Dr. Finley is also one of the founding directors of the USC SensoriMotor Assessment and Rehabilitation Training Center (SMART-VR Center). The Center’s mission is to be an interdisciplinary center of excellence harnessing innovative advances in virtual reality to improve motor and cognitive function across multiple clinical populations such as stroke, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.

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