# The Effects of Muscle Fatigability on Gait Instability in Aging and Age-Related Falls Risk

> **NIH NIH F31** · UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL · 2024 · $17,205

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Falls are a severe societal issue with vast physical and economic consequences. As we age, there are a variety of
factors that are associated with an increased falls risk such as declines in sensor, motor, and cognitive-motor
acuity. These changes may affect how we compensate for being in a fatigued state to better navigate dynamic
walking challenges due to the additional risks that they put older adults at for falls. The overarching scientific
premise of this fellowship proposal is that local muscle fatigability compromises the neuromuscular control of
walking balance and importunately precipitates gait instability in a direction-dependent and context-specific
ways in older adults. This project will recruit 30 young adults, 30 older adult non-fallers, and 30 older adult
fallers to participate in two sessions: one designed to objectively target the local fatigability of muscles that
regulate sagittal plane motion and stability and another designed to objectively target the local fatigability of
muscles that regulate coronal plane motion and stability. This project strategically combines sophisticated
motion capture and electromyographic time-frequency analyses with an innovative suite of walking balance
perturbations designed to emulate real-world balance challenges to identify novel mechanistic causes for
increased falls risk. This research study will be the first to establish the mechanisms behind fatigues effect on
walking stability through the usage of directional local muscle fatigability and a comprehensive and task specific
collection of walking balance perturbations integrated with musculoskeletal modeling and simulations. This area
of mechanistic and hypothesis-driven research has been severely understudied, but has significant and
immediate potential to inform novel advances in diagnostics, rehabilitation, mobile monitoring, and wearable
assistive technologies to mitigate falls.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10820138
- **Project number:** 5F31AG079499-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL
- **Principal Investigator:** Andrew Douglas Shelton
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $17,205
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-06-01 → 2024-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10820138

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10820138, The Effects of Muscle Fatigability on Gait Instability in Aging and Age-Related Falls Risk (5F31AG079499-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-29 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10820138. Licensed CC0.

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