ArticleeLife2023
Optimization of energy and time predicts dynamic speeds for human walking.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- The energetic cost of human standing balance and gait initiation over a range of natural postures.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Infants and Adults Are Sensitive to the Costs of Upright Versus Non-Upright Locomotion.Developmental science · 2026Article
- A low-cost markerless motion capture system to automate functional gait assessment: Feasibility study.PloS one · 2026Article
- A lightweight passive ankle exoskeleton with dual-phase energy harvesting and stiffness adaptation.Wearable technologies · 2026Article
- Quantifying Changes in Balance, Gait, Fall Risk, and Sensory Reweighting in Older Adults Following Multi-Session Electrical Vestibular Stimulation Therapy.Medical devices (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Article
- Overground gait transitions are not sharp but involve gradually changing walk-run mixtures even over long distances.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The Impact of Cast Walker Design on Metabolic Costs of Walking and Perceived Exertion.Diabetology · 2025Article
- Behavioural energetics in human locomotion: how energy use influences how we move.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Review
- How vision shapes the paths we choose.eLife · 2024Article
- Move less, spend more: the metabolic demands of short walking bouts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Human navigation strategies and their errors result from dynamic interactions of spatial uncertainties.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Shaping the energy curves of a servomotor-based hexapod robot.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Biomechanical Analysis of Human Gait When Changing Velocity and Carried Loads: Simulation Study with OpenSim.Biology · 2024Article
- Disentangling the effects of metabolic cost and accuracy on movement speed.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Walking speeds are lower for short distance and turning locomotion: Experiments and modeling in low-cost prosthesis users.PloS one · 2024Article
- The value of time in the invigoration of human movements when interacting with a robotic exoskeleton.Science advances · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans make a number of choices when they walk, such as how fast and for how long. The preferred steady walking speed seems chosen to minimize energy expenditure per distance traveled. But the speed of actual walking bouts is not only steady, but rather a time-varying trajectory, which can also be modulated by task urgency or an individual's movement vigor. Here we show that speed trajectories and durations of human walking bouts are explained better by an objective to minimize Energy and Time, meaning the total work or energy to reach destination, plus a cost proportional to bout duration. Applied to a computational model of walking dynamics, this objective predicts dynamic speed vs. time trajectories with inverted U shapes. Model and human experiment (N=10) show that shorter bouts are unsteady and dominated by the time and effort of accelerating, and longer ones are steadier and faster and dominated by steady-state time and effort. Individual-dependent vigor may be characterized by the energy one is willing to spend to save a unit of time, which explains why some may walk faster than others, but everyone may have similar-shaped trajectories due to similar walking dynamics. Tradeoffs between energy and time costs can predict transient, steady, and vigor-related aspects of walking.
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Registered trials
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.