Ground Reaction Force Frequency Content During Gait in the Elderly: Falling and Foot Dominance Effects

ABSTRACT The elderly population is experiencing a significant increase, which has led to a substantial rise in the rate of falls among them. These falls have serious consequences for their health. ground reaction force (GRF) measurements are commonly used in walking studies as they serve as evaluation criteria for walking performance. The primary objective of this study was to investigate the frequency characteristics of GRFs during gait in elderly individuals with and without a history of falls and how the dominant foot and falling may affect the frequency content of GRFs, and whether this impact exists, is the focus of this inquiry. This study was a secondary analysis of cross‐sectional data for females with and without a history of fall, from our previous study of the frequency content of GRF during walking, which was a comparison of the elderly fallers and non‐fallers. The AMTI American Force Plate (Accu ‐ 1000 Hz sampling frequency) was used for the walking test, and the frequency content of the walking data was extracted using the fast Fourier transform feature in MATLAB version 2016. SPSS 22 software (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) and M ANOVA test at a significance level of 0.05 were utilised for statistical analysis. The research findings revealed that the frequency that encompassed 99.5% of the signal ( F 99.5% ) was affected by falls ( F = 0.542, p = 0.010 < 0.05) and dominance feet ( F = 4.278, p = 0.001 <0.05) and the frequency bandwidth ( F band ) was affected by falls ( F = 2.358, p = 0.025 < 0.05) and dominance feet ( F = 20.167, p = 0.000 < 0.05). This effect was observed in the medial‐lateral and anterior–posterior planes. However, no significant changes were observed in other trajectories or variables examined within the study. It seems that assessing the frequency content of GRF has the potential to identify individuals at risk of fall‐related injuries. Implementing fall risk assessments and prevention strategies could potentially reduce such injuries among the elderly population.