下肢歩行軌道および床反力の評価によるつまずきの要因解析

抄録

It is generally agreed that the risk of falling increases with age. Falls in elderly individuals decrease their daily life activity level due to physical damage and increase fear of falling again. It is proposed that many elderly falls occur when walking, and in most, the cause is stumbling. Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the factors of stumbling during normal walking to prevent falls. Then we determined the thumb-floor distance, the angle of lower limb joints and the ground reaction forces. Furthermore, we calculated the moments of the lower limb joints from the obtained results. And compared these values during normal walking between elderly group and young group. Consequently, a significant positive correlation was found between the maximum value of the longitudinal component of ground reaction force and the maximum value of thumb-floor distance at terminal swing. Furthermore, when the longitudinal component of ground reaction force was the maximum, the hip flection moment of the elderly group was significantly lower than young group. These results showed that the cause of the fall of elderly is that the driving force at terminal stance is weak due to weak hip flexion muscles and that the knee joint is not sufficiently extended at terminal swing.