Dual-task walking in Older People: A Review of Literature

As the population of older people grows, the rate of falling among them increases significantly. This may lead to serious damage to the health status of the older people, their families and the society. One of the conditions that may result in falling in older people is when they walk and simultaneously perform another cognitive or motor task, known as dual-task walking (DTW). DTW is an interesting issue in the fields of geriatrics, cognitive and motor sciences and it is important for the researchers to decide how to design their studies on DTW paradigm. Thus, the aim of this study was to review the methodologies of DTW studies in older people.
We searched Scopus, PubMed, Embase and Index Copernicus since, 1998 till 2016. The keywords were a combination of three categories: 1) Elderly/ Older people/ aged people/ Aging; 2) Walking/ gait and 3) Cognitive/ executive function/ Memory/ Working memory/ Attention/ Processing speed/ Visuospatial/ Language/ Psychomotor speed.
Sixty-four articles met our inclusion criteria. The cognitive, motor and/or cognitive-motor tasks as the concurrent task while walking, the instrumentation for evaluating gait performance and the effects of dual-tasking on both gait properties and the quality of performing the concurrent task, were considered in our study.
While several cognitive and motor tasks are available to be used in the DTW and they need to be chosen based on the objectives of the studies, cognitive tasks are more prevalent. It may be attributed to the safety of the tasks since the hands are free to protect the elderly from possible falling during walking. Moreover, the speed of walking and other linear properties of walking were assessed in most of the studies.