Effects of Partial Absence of Visual Feedback Information on Gait Symmetry

The incorporation of real-time visual feedback during gait rehabilitation can improve the efficacy of training. Our prior work demonstrated that the imposed distortion of simple visual feedback information of step lengths entails an unintentional adaptive process in the subjects' spatial gait pattern, thereby suggesting the important role of implicit learning in the context of gait rehabilitation that employs visual feedback. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the removal of a portion of visual feedback information-after it had initially been provided-had any impact on gait symmetry. Eighteen healthy subjects walked on a treadmill for 10-min periods at their preferred walking speed and at a slower walking speed (1.3 mph) during the experimental trials, in which two simple vertical bars corresponding to subject's right and left step length were displayed on a computer screen. Halfway through the trial, one of the bars was removed from the visual feedback via random selection. Subjects were instructed to continually walk normally and also look at the visual feedback until the trials were completed. The changes in step length symmetry ratio were computed and analyzed. We found that displaying only one side of visual feedback influenced subjects to spontaneously modulate gait symmetry away from the baseline, and also that the amount of modulated gait symmetry slightly increased when their walking speed decreased. The changes in gait symmetry occurred by producing either longer right steps produced than left steps or vice versa, but we were unable to find any correlation between side of removal (right or left side) and the different types of trend in response. This warrants further investigation in a study with a larger population. Nonetheless, the results of this study demonstrated the effect of partial absence of visual feedback on changes in step symmetry, and that the perturbation of visual information caused implicit (unintentional) motor processes. A gait training procedure involving a novel way of perturbing visual feedback, such as partial absence of visual feedback tested in this study, may be of value in gait rehabilitation by driving more efficient motor adaptations.