Older people may be more at risk of falls because their arms are slower to respond when they slip, compared with their younger counterparts. Such movements help people to regain their balance.
The findings suggest that older people should be trained in moving their arms more quickly to avoid fall-related injuries, says team member at the University of Arizona.
He and his team focused on sideways falls. People鈥檚 legs can鈥檛 move sideways as freely as their arms can, so the upper limbs play a much more important role in regaining balance when they slip sideways, says Lee-Confer.
Advertisement
Compared with falling backwards or forwards, which are more commonly studied, sideways slips are more likely to cause serious injuries, such as a fractured pelvis, he says.
To better understand how to prevent such falls, the team had 11 older adults (aged 72 on average) and 11 younger adults (aged 25 on average) stride over a Plexiglass sheet embedded in a walkway at the University of Illinois in Chicago. They were made to slip sideways via movements on the walkway and lubricants on the sheet.
Motion analysis monitoring equipment was attached to the participants鈥� bodies and they were filmed from every angle using eight cameras. They all wore a special harness to ensure they couldn鈥檛 fall and hurt themselves.
The researchers found that when exposed to slip hazards, the younger adults accelerated their arms 36 per cent faster, on average, than the older participants. Their reaction time when reaching the peak speed of their arm movements was also 310 milliseconds faster.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of work on the relationship between how the legs and feet respond when a person slips, but it鈥檚 really a whole-of-body response,鈥� says at the research institute Neuroscience Research Australia.
Lee-Confer鈥檚 team plans to carry out another study with three groups: one given conventional arm strength training; the second given training that focuses on high-velocity movements, such as those used in boxing; and the third group acting as a control with no intervention. Around 12 weeks later, the researchers will examine whether the arm responses differ between the groups when exposed to a slip incident and whether this reduces their risk of falls.
bioRxiv
