The effect of first‐time <scp>4‐</scp>wheeled walker use on the gait of younger and older adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The 4-wheeled walker is intended to enhance balance and gait for older adults. Yet, some research suggests that walking aids increase falls risk. An understanding of the influence of age with walker use on gait performance is required. OBJECTIVE: To examine the effect of initial 4-wheeled walker use on spatiotemporal gait parameters between younger and older adults. DESIGN: Cross-sectional, repeated-measures. SETTING: Community-dwelling. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-five younger (age: 26.5 ± 4.1 years) and 24 older (age: 68.5 ± 10.5 years) adults participated. Younger adults were aged 18 to 35 years, whereas older adults were 50 years or older. Included were people not requiring the use of a walking aid, and those able to converse in English. INTERVENTIONS: Not applicable. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Gait velocity and stride time variability were recorded using accelerometers. Gait was examined under three conditions: unassisted walking; walking with a 4-wheeled walker; and walking with a 4-wheeled walker while completing a secondary task. Conditions were performed across two walking paths: straight and figure-of-8 Walk Test. Separate mixed-methods analyses of variance (ANOVAs; within-subject: condition/path; between-subject: group) were used for statistical analyses. RESULTS: Velocity was lower when walking using a walker while completing a cognitive task (p < .001), in the figure-of-8 Walk Test (p < .001), and in older adults (p = .001). Stride time variability increased with walking path and condition difficulty (p < .001) for the straight path versus the figure-of-8 Walk Test. CONCLUSIONS: Using a 4-wheeled walker resulted in a slower and more inconsistent gait pattern across both age groups. Walking more complex configurations resulted in the prioritization of gait over the cognitive task while performing the dual-task conditions. No evidence of an age-related difference in the effect of initial walker use on gait was observed. Nonetheless, walkers are cognitively demanding and their introduction should warrant a clinical follow-up.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".