New model reveals human balance and adaptation secrets, opening doors to revolutionary rehabilitation and wearable robotics advancements.
How Humans Continuously Adapt While Walking Stably
A new model has potential applications in sensorimotor learning, rehabilitation, and wearable robotics.
Adaptation is a crucial aspect of human movement, particularly in tasks like walking. Unlike episodic tasks, such as reaching for an object, errors during locomotion can have significant short-term and long-term consequences to stability unless controlled. This complexity makes it challenging to adapt locomotion in new environments.
The researchers identified general principles of locomotor adaptation across various task settings and developed a unified modular and hierarchical model of locomotor adaptation with each component having its own unique mathematical structure. The resulting model successfully encapsulates how humans adapt their walking in novel settings, such as on a split-belt treadmill with each foot at a different speed or wearing asymmetric leg weights.
The model has the potential to revolutionize rehabilitation paradigms and wearable robot control by predicting human adaptation to new environments. According to Nidhi Seethapathi, “Having a model that can predict how a person will adapt to a new environment has immense utility.” The study’s findings have significant implications for understanding human-robot adaptation and could help speed up the development of more effective rehabilitation programs.
Understanding how humans adapt to novel settings is essential for creating more advanced wearable robots. By developing this model, researchers aim to narrow the search space for optimal robot control.
