Differences between adults and adolescents in responding to hip and knee pattern feedback during gait

Visual feedback techniques have shown potential in interventions aiming to retrain deviated gait patterns. Understanding the abilities of different age groups to modify their gait is needed to optimize interventions. Twelve adults (6F, 6 M; 26.3 ± 5.9 yrs.) and twelve adolescents (4F, 8 M; 13.6 ± 2.3 yrs) without disabilities participated in one training session. During the session, the responses to a visual kinematic feedback task in which one hip or knee target pattern was modified while unmodified target patterns were maintained in the other hip and knee joints were investigated. Limb orientation and acceleration data were collected using Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) (Xsens Awinda, Enschede, The Netherlands) with a sampling frequency of 60 Hz. Adults tended to outperform adolescents in tracking modified target patterns and showed smaller errors in unmodified regions of modified patterns (p = 0.045); they also outperformed adolescents in unmodified joints (Contralateral Hip: p = 0.003; Contralateral Knee: p = 0.002; Ipsilateral Joint: p = 0.048). These findings suggest different levels of awareness of the need and/or ability to minimize errors across joints, in turn suggesting the need for specialization of training for these age groups.