Evaluation of corticospinal drive during ground walking with visual guidance

Abstract

Background: Current methods for evaluating body movements—controlled by brain and nervous system functions—do not effectively assess internal processes such as brain and nervous system activity related to movement output. Therefore, there is a need to develop an evaluation method for human physical function that specifically targets brain and nervous system. Aim: To investigate the differences in brain and nervous system function during various walking tasks. Methods: The participants were 10 healthy adults (10 women, aged 19– 35 years). The exercise tasks were (i) a 20-m round-trip walk as a normal walk and (ii) a target-task walk, which involved walking with the task of stepping on a line every 3 m on a course similar to that for normal walking. Electromyography (EMG) was applied to the proximal tibialis anterior (pTA), distal tibialis anterior (dTA), medial gastrocnemius (MG), and lateral gastrocnemius (LG) muscles to record muscle activity. Results: No difference was noted between normal walking and target-task walking for the pTA and dTA (t(9) = 0.479, p = 0.643, d = 0.090). However, between the MG and LG, coherence in target-task walking showed a trend toward higher values ((t(8)) = -2.185, p = 0.060, d = 0.404), although this was not statistically significant. Conclusions: The results of this study indicate that the neural drive might be stronger during target walking movements with visual tasks than during simple walking movements, and that neural activity tends to be more active when accompanied by visual feedback. This study implemented it during ground walking. Beyond the laboratory setting, it holds promise for future application as a practical method in educational settings. Therefore, further data accumulation is necessary going forward.