The Effect Of Different Foot-wearing Conditions On Walking Stability Of Elderly Based On Different Data Analyses

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the walking stability of four kinds of foot-wearing conditions of the elderly women in bare foot,wearing slippers,wearing ordinary sport shoes and wearing old-age walking shoes,based on three different quantitative methods.Providing recommendations about foot-wearing conditions for the elderly women to reduce the risk of falls,and to evaluate whether old-age walking shoes could improve the stability of the elderly compared to ordinary sport shoes.Methods: Subjects were women aged 60-75 years.Each of four foot-wearing tests was applying on a treadmill at individual's optimal speed of an 8 minutes walk.The kinematic data were collected by infrared high speed motion capture system.The walking stability was evaluated by several different methods based on variability evaluation of gait parameters(standard deviation,coefficient of variation,median absolute deviation),maximum Lyapunov exponent and Hurst index.Results: The results of the variability showed that there was no significant difference of different foot-wearing conditions.The results of the maximum Lyapunov exponent showed that there were significant differences of different foot-wearing conditions calculated from different indexes,the value of the maximum Lyapunov exponent of bare-foot condition was significantly smaller than other three conditions.The results of the Hurst index calculated from the distance between left and right heels showed that when wearing old-age walking shoes,the indexes were significantly higher than other three conditions.Conclusion: 1.Variability methods did not differentiate the difference of four foot-wearing conditions 2.The results of the maximum Lyapunov exponent suggested that walking in bare-foot would significantly lead to instability of the elderly,and there were no many significant differences when wearing shoes 3.Hurst index statistics showed that the old-age walking shoes would make walking with a stronger long-range correlation,which showed that old-age walking shoes help the elderly more to maintain steady-state walking.