Researcher works to identify best practices to reduce risk of falls

3/09/2016 |

Falls are the number one cause of accidental death of the elderly and the third leading accidental killer among all age groups. Every 17 seconds, an older adult is treated in an emergency room and every 30 minutes an older adult dies from a fall-related injury. These startling statistics are at the heart of Shirley Rietdyk’s research.

Rietdyk, associate professor of health and kinesiology, studies the interaction of neural, muscular and mechanical systems in mobility, posture and balance. Decrements in any of these systems increase the likelihood of falls. In the Biomechanics Laboratory located in Lambert Fieldhouse, Rietdyk and her research team are looking for clues as to how the nervous system incorporates visual and sensory information to coordinate muscle activity for safe, balanced movement.

Using an Optotrak motion analysis system — a set of sophisticated cameras and software that records movement — the researchers track subjects young and old, healthy and compromised. With information from infrared emitting markers placed on the subjects, they capture movement to better understand what leads to falls.

In collaboration with Jessica Huber from Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences and Jeffrey Haddad from Health and Kinesiology, Rietdyk is examining what happens when a person walks and talks at the same time. A landmark study from 1997 showed that older adults who could not walk and talk at the same time — those who had to stop before answering a question — were more likely to fall within six months. The researchers are completing more complex experiments and analyses in order to better understand this relationship.

Rietdyk has been interested in balance and mobility since her undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She set out to be a physical therapist, but a co-op experience in a research lab during her sophomore year got her hooked on biomechanics. “I loved the challenge,” she says. “Every time I learned something, I uncovered new questions and I enjoyed the creativity of figuring out how to design experiments to answer those questions.”

One of her goals is to inform physical therapy and rehabilitation, helping identify best practices to reduce fall risk. In a study recently funded by the National Science Foundation, Rietdyk and her colleagues, Haddad, Arvind Raman from Mechanical Engineering and Howard Zelaznik from Health and Kinesiology, are aiming to improve a decades-old rehabilitation device called a wobble board, or balance board. Their goals are to improve early detection of neuromuscular disorders and improve rehabilitation of balance-compromised populations. Among the subjects they plan to test are individuals with multiple sclerosis, in collaboration with the Department of Neurology at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

“Up to 53 percent of falls are caused by a trip, when a person’s foot unexpectedly contacts an obstacle such as a curb or stair,” Rietdyk notes. “Why people fail to successfully step over an obstacle that they knew was there is largely unknown. Understanding this failure and developing therapies to prevent this failure will be instrumental in decreasing the likelihood of falls.”

Original article: http://bit.ly/2edclxt

Above: Shirley Rietdyk, a professor of health and kinesiology, found that young adults fall more frequently than expected and most falls occur during everyday activities such walking and talking. These research findings are published in Human Movement Science. (Purdue University photo/Charles Jischke)