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Updated: Sep 5, 2025
Clinical Assessment of Spatiotemporal Gait Parameters in Patients and Older Adults
Published on: November 7, 2014
Synchronization performance affects gait variability measures during cued walking
S Jordão1, N Cortes2, J Gomes3
1Neuromuscular Research Lab, Faculty of Human Kinetics, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal; Hospital da Ordem Terceira Chiado, Lisbon, Portugal.
Background:
Incorporating variability within gait rehabilitation offers a promising approach to restore functional capacity. However, it's success requires adequate synchronization, a parameter that lacks report in most of the literature regarding cued gait training.
Research Question:
How changes to synchronization performance during fractal-like and isochronous cueing impacts gait variability measures?
Methods:
We asked twelve young male participants to walk in synchronization to two different temporally structure cueing (isochronous [ISO] and fractal [FRC]). We have also manipulated the cueing's tempo by increasing and decreasing it by 5% to manipulate synchronization, resulting in six conditions (stimuli [ISO,FRC] x tempo [SLOW, NORMAL, FAST]). The normal condition was set from an uncued trial through the participant's self-paced stride time. Synchronization performance (ASYNC) and gait variability (fractal scaling and coefficient of variation) were calculated from stride time data ( -ISIs,CV-ISIs). Repeated measures analysis of variance or Aligned Rank Transform were conducted to determine significant differences between metronome tempo and stimuli for the dependent variables RESULTS: Our results showed a FAST tempo decreases synchronization performance (ASYNC) and leads to lower -ISIs, for both ISO and FRC stimuli. This indicates that when an individual exhibits poor synchronization during cued gait training, his/her gait variability patterns will not follow the temporal structure of the presented metronome. Specifically, if the individual poorly synchronizes to the cues, the gait patterns become more random, a condition typically observed in older adults and neurological patients, which runs contrary to the hypothesis when using fractal-like metronomes.
Significance:
This study provides supporting evidence that measuring synchronization performance in cued training is fundamental for a proper clinical interpretation of its effects. This is particularly relevant for the recent and ongoing clinical research using fractal-like metronomes since the expected gait patterns are dependent on the synchronization performance. Randomized control trials must incorporate synchronization performance related measures.
