ABSTRACT
The difference between the walking speeds of stroke patients and the general population may influence the self-perception of patients, who perceive their walk as lacking general human-likeness. Perception toward human-likeness during walking is defined here as the feeling that one can walk as intended, just like healthy people. Such negative subjective experiences may curb their social participation. However, the perception associated with walking speed in stroke patients is poorly understood. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between walking speed and perception toward general human-likeness during walking in stroke patients. Thirty-two post-stroke patients were enrolled in this cross-sectional study. Patients performed 10-m walk tests at comfortable and fast speeds and answered questions about their perceived human-like walking after completing the walk ("How much did you feel your walking resembled the human-likeness during walking of general people?"). We found a significant positive correlation between perception toward human-likeness during walking and walking speed at both comfortable and fast speeds. To the best of our knowledge, this report is the first to suggest that walking speed may correlate with self-perception. Our findings may help understand the underlying mechanism in patients perceiving less human-likeness during walking.
ABSTRACT
Haptic feedback by light touch with a fingertip influences the postural control of the human body by postural orientation. Postural control might therefore differ depending on the characteristics of the contacting object. The main experimental targets of contact have been a fixed object (fixed light touch: FLT) and an individual (interpersonal light touch: ILT), but the postural control characteristics of FLT and ILT have not been directly compared within the same study. Nor has there been a study comparing frequency characteristics in these conditions. We hypothesized that (1) the frequency of postural sway would be higher in FLT and that no such change would be observed in ILT, and (2) the interpersonal postural coordination that is specific to ILT, i.e., sway that resembles the other person's sway, would be observed in the low-frequency component (≤0.4 Hz) rather than the high-frequency component (>0.4 Hz). We applied a closed-eyes tandem stance by adult subjects as the standard condition, and the center of pressure was measured when they performed four standing conditions: no-touch, FLT, stable ILT with a bipedal partner, and unstable ILT with a tandem partner. The results demonstrated that the FLT condition and both the stable and unstable ILT conditions also stabilized the posture, but the stability was superior in the FLT condition. Further, the difference in postural stability depending on the axis is not clear in any conditions for velocity, whereas for amplitude, stabilization by contact is more easily captured in the medio-lateral (ML) axis than in the anterior-posterior (AP) axis. The mean power frequency (MPF) in the FLT condition was higher than the no-touch condition, and the stable ILT condition in the ML axis and was higher than any other conditions in the AP axis. Moreover, the stable ILT condition in both axes was not significantly different from the no-touch condition. The unstable ILT condition in the AP axis was also not significantly different, though the ML axis was higher than the no-touch condition. The interpersonal postural coordination in both the stable and unstable ILT conditions was observed in the low-frequency component (except for the ML axis of the unstable ILT condition) and not in the high-frequency component. These results support our hypotheses and suggest that although FLT and ILT exert effects on reducing postural sway to some certain extent, in actuality, these conditions result in different postural controls in the frequency domain due to postural coordination based on the low-frequency component.
