About the seminar
One in three community-dwelling people aged over 65 years fall each year. As many falls occur due to trips and slips, skill in avoiding obstacles is a key proactive gait strategy for safe ambulation and fall prevention in everyday life. Previous studies have shown that such sensorimotor skills may be trained using virtual reality (VR) on a treadmill. However, VR does not provide somatosensory feedback associated with foot-obstacle collisions limiting its training efficacy and generalisability.
The HoloWalk VR program involves a virtual-to-reality (VtR) technology. VtR involves an instrumented treadmill that can accelerate/decelerate, motion capture and VR headset to simulate somatosensory feedback of foot-obstacle collisions and resulting balance loss. Dr Yoshiro Okubo presents findings from a 2020 UNSW Ageing Futures Institute seed grant, including two studies using VtR in young and older people.
About the presenter
Dr Yoshi Okubo completed his PhD (Sports Medicine) at the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 2015. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia and a Conjoint Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales. Yoshi is an emerging world leader in exercise interventions for falls prevention, with his research focused on balance/gait, task-specific training and immersive virtual reality. His study program has demonstrated that older people and people with Parkinson’s disease can regain their ability to avoid falling at the critical moment of an unexpected trip or slip. He recently led international experts in writing a seminal review “Perturbation-based balance training: Principles, mechanisms and implementation in clinical practice”.