Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Characterize Gait and Posture Disturbances in Aging and Related Diseases

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Background

Aging introduces disturbances into the gait and posture of subjects. Such variations can be related to a wide range of causes, pathologic and not, making it challenging to understand when modifications are related to disease or natural causes. Many disciplines meet to perform such kind of analysis (e.g. computational and experimental mechanics, image processing, medicine, biology, physiology, machine learning, data science). Gait analysis is particularly sensitive to the interactions of different disciplines. Gait allows the study of human movements, but only through a multidisciplinary approach is it possible to infer relations of causation. Narrow studies focused on specific techniques are important to develop the fundamental tools required to study movement. Significant methodological advances have been made singularly in those fields during the last years. However, studies that aim to cross the borders of current science and develop consistent results need to set interdisciplinary goals. An inclusive approach merging multiple aspects would be key in targeting pharmacological or rehabilitation interventions and improving patient care overall.

These studies need to take into consideration multiple factors, such as the interaction between tissue structure and loads at the joints, or clinical, biological and cognitive factors that can influence or are influenced by gait and posture.

Life can be understood as a dynamic system in which several factors interact with each other and create non-linear scenarios. Not considering age-related factors that are relevant for gait and posture analysis can generate misleading and contradictory results. Modern research often suffers from a lack of repeatability, consistency in results, and confounding of parameters, and this problem can be related to the lack of multidisciplinary approaches applied. Specific studies can appear significant when performed individually, but they can lose significance when included in the wider research context in which they belong. Different factors deriving from a multidisciplinary research can interact with each other to create a dynamic and non-linear system. This means they will present high variability of the output in spite of small variability of the input, thus limiting the repeatability of the results if interactions among factors are not considered.

In this context, gait and posture analysis is a typical field of study that can be used as an independent tool to compute dynamics and kinetics of subjects. However, interpretations are typically related to a musculoskeletal, clinical, cognitive and/or emotional context that can be strongly affected by age and age-related diseases. Widening the view of gait and posture analysis, and promoting the simultaneous analysis of multiple factors belonging to different disciplines is the goal of the present Research Topic. Giving a holistic approach to the study of human position and movement increases the contextualization of each study, and by doing so will also increase the repeatability and reliability of the studies.

The current Research Topic covers Original Research articles aiming to connect different fields, giving a wider interpretation of gait and posture analysis in aging, including the simultaneous analysis of data coming from several disciplines like tissue imaging, computational modeling, biological studies, and how they interact to create a wider view of human motion. Reviews of literature focused on the interaction between different musculoskeletal disciplines will also be considered for publication. Finally, tools developed with the specific aim to perform multidisciplinary analysis can be considered.

Analysis techniques can be, but are not limited to:

• Cross-disciplinary approaches to musculoskeletal problems
• Fusion of gait and posture analysis with imaging data
• Interaction of gait and posture and computational modeling
• Dynamic systems
• Machine learning approach
• Multifactorial analysis
• Functional near-infrared spectroscopy
• Electroencephalogram
• Resting-State Functional MRI

Important Note: All submissions/contributions to this Research Topic must be in line with the scope of the journal/section they are submitted to. While authors are encouraged to draw from other disciplines to enrich their papers where relevant, they must ensure papers fall within the scope of the journal/section, as expressed in its mission statement.

We would like to acknowledge Prof. Juan Fernando Ramirez Patino as Coordinator, and for his contribution to the preparation of this Research Topic.

Keywords: Gait, Posture, Multi-Factorial Analysis, Cross-Disciplinary, Repeatability, Aging

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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