Haptic feedback intervention decreases the spatial margin when older adults walk through a narrow space.

Background: The ability to avoid obstacles efficiently and safely is important for older adults to prevent injuries from tripping and falling. It is important to find an optimal spatial margin between the body and an obstacle considering both safety and efficiency. One side of finding the optimal margin is to decrease the margin in terms of motor efficiency. In this study, we tested whether fingertip-contact intervention to obtain haptic feedback information to perceive the relationship between body and the environment could immediately improve spatial perception and collision avoidance behavior (an instantaneous effect).

Methods: Twenty-seven older adults (12 males and 15 females) participated in the experiment. In the intervention of the fingertip-contact group, they lightly touched the edge of a door with both fingertips while walking. The test task before and after the intervention involved grasping a horizontal bar and passing through a narrow opening. As dependent variables, we measured the spatial margin and the collision rate.

Results: The fingertip-contact group showed a significant decrease in the spatial margin after the intervention. On the other hand, there was no significant improvement in the collision rate after the intervention but rather a decrease only in the control group.

Conclusion: The results obtained in this study indicate that touching obstacles with the fingertips had an instantaneous effect, leading to efficient movement learning, although a possible side effect of an increased collision rated was also found. The proposed intervention might promote an efficiency-based strategy due to learning the spatial relationship between the body and the environment, and it may suppress the excessive avoidance of older adults.