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<H3><A NAME="SECTION00030300000000000000">Stride Time Dynamics</A></H3>
<P>
To study the intrinsic stride-to-stride dynamics and its changes with age, some
preprocessing was performed on each time series. The first
sixty seconds and the last five seconds of each time
series were not included to eliminate any
start-up or ending effects and
to allow the subject to become familiar
with the walking track. The time series were also processed to
remove any pauses (stride time > 2 seconds and the 5 seconds before and
after any pauses) as well as any large spikes or outliers. These
outliers, which occurred infrequently, were removed so that the
intrinsic dynamics of each time series could be more readily
analyzed. This was accomplished using
previously established methods (8,10) by: i) determining the mean and standard deviation of the
stride time while excluding the 5% of the data with the lowest and
highest values, and then ii) removing from the original time series
all data that fell more than 4.0 standard deviations away from this
mean value. The number of pauses (typically 0) and the number of
strides excluded (typically 2 %) were similar in all three
age groups.
<P>
As shown in Table 1 and
summarized below, we applied several measures
to analyze the variability and temporal structure of the stride time
dynamics.
<P>
<P><P>
<B>Stride-to-Stride Variability Measures</B>
<P>
To estimate the overall
stride-to-stride variability, we calculated the standard deviation
of each time series and
the coefficient of variation (CV) (100<IMG WIDTH=8 HEIGHT=20 ALIGN=MIDDLE ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline304" SRC="img7.png">standard deviation/mean),
an index of
variability normalized to each subject's mean cycle duration.
Both the standard deviation and the CV provide a measure of overall variations
in gait timing during the entire walk, i.e., the amplitude of the
fluctuations in the time series with respect to the mean. However,
these measures may be influenced by trends in the data (e.g., due
to a change in speed) and cannot distinguish between a walk with large changes
from one stride to the next and one in which stride-to-stride
variations are small and more long-term, global changes (e.g., a change in
average value) result in a large standard deviation. Therefore,
to estimate variability independent of
local changes in the mean, we quantified
successive stride-to-stride changes (i.e., the difference between the
stride time of one stride and the previous stride) by determining the first difference of
each time series. The first difference, a discrete analog
of the first derivative, is one standard method for removing slow varying trends and is calculated by subtracting the previous value in the
time series from the current value. The standard deviation of the first
difference time series provides
a measure of variability after detrending.
<P>
<P><P>
<B>Temporal Structure Measures</B>
<P>
To study the temporal organization, we applied three methods to analyze
different aspects of the dynamical structure of the
time series of the stride time.
<P>
<B>Spectral Analysis: </B> Fourier spectral analysis is a standard method for
examining the dynamics of a time series. To
insure that these dynamical measures were independent of the average
stride time or the stride time variability, we studied the first 256
points of each subject's time series (after the 60 second ``start-up'' period) by first subtracting the mean and
dividing by the standard deviation. This produces a time series
centered at zero with a standard deviation of 1.0. Subsequently,
standard Fourier analysis using a rectangular window was performed on each time
series. To quantify any differences in the spectra, we calculated the
percent of power in the high frequency band (0.25--0.50
strides<IMG WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=9 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline306" SRC="img8.png">) and the ratio of the low (.05 -- 0.25 strides<IMG WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=9 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline306" SRC="img8.png">)
to high frequency power.
This ratio excludes the power in the lowest frequencies and
thus is independent of very large scale changes in the stride time.
By computing the ratio of the fluctuations over relatively long time scales
(i.e., low frequencies)
to short time scales (i.e., high frequencies), an index of the
frequency ``balance'' of the
spectra is obtained. A large low/high
ratio is indicative of nonstationarity.
Therefore, to the extent that the gait of the younger children is more
nonstationary, one would expect this spectral
ratio to decrease with maturation.
<P>
<B>Autocorrelation Decay: </B> As a complementary method for analyzing
the temporal structure of gait dynamics, we examined the autocorrelation properties of
the stride time series. The autocorrelation function estimates how a
time series is correlated with itself over different time lags and
provides a measure of the ``memory'' in the system, i.e., for up to
how many strides is the present value of the stride time correlated
with past values. After direct calculation of the
autocorrelation function in the time domain (20),
we calculated two
indices of autocorrelation decay: <IMG WIDTH=31 HEIGHT=18 ALIGN=MIDDLE ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline310" SRC="img9.png"> and
<IMG WIDTH=31 HEIGHT=18 ALIGN=MIDDLE ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline312" SRC="img10.png">, the number of strides for the autocorrelation to decay
to 37 % (1/e) or 63 % (1-1/e) of its initial value,
respectively. To minimize any effects of data length, mean or
variance, we applied this analysis to the first 256 strides and
normalized each time series with respect to its mean and standard
deviation. This autocorrelation measure emphasizes the correlation
properties over a very short time scale, where the correlation decays
most rapidly.
If the ``memory'' of the system increases with maturity, one would
expect to see longer decay times in older children.
<P>
<B>Stride Time Correlations: </B> To further study the temporal
structure of the stride time dynamics (independent of the overall
variance), we also applied detrended fluctuation analysis
(DFA) (11,18) to each subject's stride time time series. DFA is a
modified random walk analysis that can be used to quantify the
long-range, fractal properties of a relatively long time series or, in
the case of shorter time series, (i.e., the present study), it can be
used to measure how correlation properties change over different time
scales or observation windows (10,18). Methodologic details have
been provided elsewhere (10-12,18). Briefly, the root-mean
square fluctuation of the integrated and detrended time series is
calculated at different time scales and the slope of the relationship
between the fluctuation magnitude and the time scale determines a fractal
scaling index, <IMG WIDTH=10 HEIGHT=9 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline314" SRC="img11.png">. To determine
the degree and nature of stride time correlations, we used previously
validated methods (10) and calculated <IMG WIDTH=10 HEIGHT=9 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline314" SRC="img11.png"> over the region <IMG WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=29 ALIGN=MIDDLE ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline318" SRC="img12.png"> (where n is the number of strides in the window of
observation). This region was chosen as it provides a statistically
robust estimate of stride time correlation properties that are most
independent of finite size effects (length of data) (17) and because
it has been shown to be sensitive to the effects of neurological
disease and aging in older adults (10). Like the autocorrelation method,
the DFA method quantifies correlation properties. However, the DFA method
assumes that within the scale of interest the correlation decays in a power-law
manner and, therefore, a single exponent (<IMG WIDTH=10 HEIGHT=9 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline314" SRC="img11.png">) can quantify the scaling.
Whereas the autocorrelation method was applied to examine the dynamics over very short time scales,
the DFA method as applied here examines scaling over relatively
longer time periods.
If the stride-to-stride fluctuations are more random (less correlated) in younger children,
one would expect that <IMG WIDTH=10 HEIGHT=9 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline314" SRC="img11.png"> would be closer to 0.5 (white noise)
in this group. In contrast,
an <IMG WIDTH=10 HEIGHT=9 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="tex2html_wrap_inline314" SRC="img11.png"> value closer to 1.5 would indicate fluctutations
with a brown noise quality, indicatinig
the dominance of slow moving (18).
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