Motek CAREN’s dual-belt treadmill used in fall-prevention research

The Motek Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment (CAREN) was featured in published research exploring the effectiveness of fall-prevention interventions. This research was posted recently on the ISPGR blog, read more here.

The paper, entitled “Learning but not sharing: Retention but no interlimb transfer of gait adaptions following perturbations to one leg“, used the CAREN’s dual-belt treadmill to apply unexpected perturbations to each leg throughout a number of sessions. The margin of stability (MoS) was used to assess how the stability of the body configuration changed, and whether the effects of fall-prevention training were retained one month later.

“We found significant improvements in MoS on the first day for perturbations to the trained leg, but the untrained leg showed no differences before and after the training. On the second day, the first perturbation to the trained leg led to a very similar response to the post-training state on day one, indicating almost full retention of the training effects, one month later…

“Our findings demonstrated that gait perturbations can stimulate large training effects that can be retained over time. The almost fully retained training effect after one month of not training shows that the task is promising for falls prevention interventions, where long-term effects are very important.”

Read the full paper here.