Advances in Human Locomotion

Home page Description: 
Understanding how humans move and navigate.
Posted On: September 26, 2019
Image Caption: 
Conference attendee and Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Olinda Habib Perez, works under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Musselman at KITE, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute - Lyndhurst Centre. Her research studies the effects of intensive balance training in individuals with chronic spinal cord injury on quiet standing centre of pressure measures

 

Conference: International Society of Posture & Gait Research (ISPGR) World Congress, June 30–July 4, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Conference Highlight: The ISPGR World Congress provides an excellent platform to share research and clinical findings related to the control of gait and posture.

Conference Summary:

The 2019 World Congress featured high-calibre speakers from across the globe. Dr. Janice Eng, the first keynote speaker, emphasized that only 14% of research gets translated from the laboratory to practice and it takes 17 years for knowledge translation. These findings shed light on the ongoing efforts that are required to improve rehabilitation assessments and interventions by working with clinicians when conducting clinical research. Dr. Avril Mansfield’s presentation, which highlighted her work and that of other UHN researchers, focused on how to incorporate evidence-based research for balance training using perturbation training as a fall-prevention intervention in various clinical populations.

Other interesting symposiums included presentations on the early development of human locomotion and navigation. One presenter challenged the notion that humans are born as bipedal mammals because infant stepping without arm contribution is the first movement observed after birth. The study examined two-day old infants by placing them on a wheeled platform, similar to that of a skateboard, and demonstrated that they moved both their arms and legs, illustrating a quadrupedal locomotion movement rather than bipedal. The researcher’s decision to move their laboratory to a maternity ward was especially interesting and increased our understanding of early development. The symposium of human navigation illustrated how individuals navigate locomotion in situations where a person walks toward them from various directions. The research revealed that humans organize their walking pattern in a path that will avoid a collision with another person by speeding up or slowing down their walking speed. The study also found that humans increase the path distance from a collision when the other person is in a power wheelchair. Overall, this symposium emphasized the importance of using ecological video data to understand how human navigation control occurs in a crowd.