Chaotic perturbations to avoid falls in elderly - SMILING

Researchers in Europe continue the good fight against age-related impairments and in favour of social inclusion. Experts from the SMILING ('Self mobility improvement in the elderly by counteracting falls') project, initiated by Step of Mind ltd, focused on prevention of falls by training the elderly to walk on uneven ground while carrying out another activity. The result? A pair of computer-controlled shoes that simulate changes in the height and slope of the ground beneath a user's feet during active walking.

SMILING offers life satisfaction - Headlines - Research – European Commission: "SMILING offers life satisfaction - Headlines - Research – European Commission"

Walking on books

As far as SoM's approach means walking on changing surfaces that can not be predicted, the idea of Hungarian artists may also be useful. © AP/Scanpix

The level of difficulty may be increased from lullabies with pictures through fantasy to enciclopedias.

© AP/Scanpix

StepPer

Physiotherapy with skies

Here I saw for the first time the advise of using skies for physiotherapy exercising.

The walking with skies makes the patient to flex his knees in order to rise a leg higher, but, more important to activate all the ankle movements to avoid the over-crossing of the skies. The exercises may be performed while hording the parallel bars.
The skies are 50-70 cm long and fixated firmly along all the sole to a shoe.
Also weights may be added. I think the weights may be moved along skies or may be located asymmetrically.

Locomotion

We should know what we are talking about. We are talking about function and the important function for this blog is locomotion, meaning the one's possibility to move himself from one place to another. Walking is the way of locomotion of the particular interest in rehabilitation, though there are other types of human locomotion: running, crawling, climbing, swimming, and even, may be, flying.