Current Interests

Falling is a serious health risk for the elderly and other populations with neuromuscular deficits. Problems with balance are a frequent reason why people fall and many falls occur while walking.

We are using a virtual reality environment to study how vision is used for making foot placement corrections related to walking balance. Specifically, our goal is to test model-based predictions of how physical requirements for maintaining balance and quality of visual information affect how components of vision are utilized. The visual surround can be suddenly perturbed to induce balance corrections and/or continuously oscillated to make the visual information less reliable. The findings of these studies will lend insight into how vision is used and integrated for walking control and may lead to improvements in our understanding of how to treat and assist patients with sensory loss or deficits.