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Inter-joint and temporal coordination change in very slow walking

Purpose Very slow walking has been suggested to be a distinctively different motor behavior than walking at comfortable gait speeds. While kinematic and spatiotemporal gait parameters are known to scale with gait speed, inter-joint coordination during swing remains consistent, at least across comfortable speeds. The purpose of this study was to determine whether coordination patterns serving limb clearance and shortening differ with very slow walking, providing additional support for the premise that very slow walking represents a unique motor behavior. Methods We assessed nine healthy adults walking overground at their self-selected speed and two-to-three progressively slower speeds. We collected lower extremity kinematics with 3D motion analysis and quantified joint motion contributions to limb clearance and shortening. We investigated changes in coordination using linear mixed models to determine magnitude and timing differences of joint influence across walking speeds. Results Hip and knee influences serving limb clearance reduced considerably with slower walking speeds. Similarly, knee influence on limb shortening reduced with very slow walking. Importantly, ankle influence remained unchanged across gait speeds for limb shortening and reduced subtly for limb clearance. Temporally, joint influences on limb clearance varied across walking speeds. Specifically, the temporal order of peak hip and knee influences reversed between comfortable and very slow walking. For limb shortening the timing of ankle influence remained unchanged while the timing of knee influence occurred later in the gait cycle for slower walking speeds. Conclusions Our results demonstrate temporal coordination and the relative joint contributions serving limb clearance and shortening differ with very slow walking providing additional evidence that slow walking may be a behavior distinct from walking at comfortable speeds.