ArticleRoyal Society open science2017
Walking with wider steps changes foot placement control, increases kinematic variability and does not improve linear stability.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Biomechanical Influence of Step Width on Typical Locomotor Activities: A Systematic Review.Sports medicine - open · 2024Pooled it
- Effects of one night of sleep deprivation on single- and dual-task gait.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2026Article
- Dynamic stability is tied to gait assistance when walking with a hip exoskeleton.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Changes in corticospinal excitability in response to mediolateral gait instability.Experimental physiology · 2026Article
- How do we tread? Differences in stability-related foot placement control between overground and treadmill walking in young adults.PloS one · 2026Article
- Natural variability can increase human walking metabolic costs and its implications to simulation-based metabolic estimation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- James-Stein Estimator Improves Accuracy and Sample Efficiency in Human Kinematic and Metabolic Data.Annals of biomedical engineering · 2025Article
- Dataset of walking and running biomechanics with different step widths across different speeds.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Effects of step width and gait speed on the variability of mediolateral control in the head and trunk during gait.PloS one · 2025Article
- Generalizability of foot placement control strategies during unperturbed and perturbed gait.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- People with degenerative cervical myelopathy have impaired reactive balance during walking.Gait & posture · 2024Article
- Walking speeds are lower for short distance and turning locomotion: Experiments and modeling in low-cost prosthesis users.PloS one · 2024Article
- How Adaptive Ankle Exoskeleton Assistance Affects Stability During Perturbed and Unperturbed Walking in the Elderly.Annals of biomedical engineering · 2023Article
- Mediolateral foot placement control can be trained: Older adults learn to walk more stable, when ankle moments are constrained.PloS one · 2023Article
- Asymmetry measures for quantification of mechanisms contributing to dynamic stability during stepping-in-place gait.Frontiers in neurology · 2023Article
- Impaired foot placement strategy during walking in people with incomplete spinal cord injury.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2022Article
- Stabilization demands of walking modulate the vestibular contributions to gait.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Increased Arm Swing and Rocky Surfaces Reduces Postural Control in Healthy Young Adults.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2021Article
- Electronic system for step width estimation using programmable system-on-chip technology and time of flight cameras.HardwareX · 2020Article
- Active foot placement control ensures stable gait: Effect of constraints on foot placement and ankle moments.PloS one · 2020Observational
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Walking humans respond to pulls or pushes on their upper body by changing where they place their foot on the next step. Usually, they place their foot further along the direction of the upper body perturbation. Here, we examine how this foot placement response is affected by the average step width during walking. We performed experiments with humans walking on a treadmill, both normally and at five different prescribed step widths. We prescribed step widths by requiring subjects to step on lines drawn on the treadmill belt. We inferred a linear model between the torso marker state at mid-stance and the next foot position. The coefficients in this linear model (which are analogous to feedback gains for foot placement) changed with increasing step width as follows. The sideways foot placement response to a given sideways torso deviation decreased. The fore-aft foot placement response to a given fore-aft torso deviation also decreased. Coupling between fore-aft foot placement and sideways torso deviations increased. These changes in foot placement feedback gains did not significantly affect walking stability as quantified by Floquet multipliers (which estimate how quickly the system corrects a small perturbation), despite increasing foot placement variance and upper body motion variance (kinematic variability).
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.