Article

Determining the appropriate amount of accommodation time is an important
component of research protocol design in the field of limb prosthetics.
Insufficiently short or excessively long accommodation periods may limit the
external validity of findings and/or the economic efficiency and ethical
innocuousness of a study. However, issuing general recommendations is difficult,
as individual accommodation periods are affected by subject characteristics, the
nature of the intervention, and possibly a number of environmental factors. We
are discussing an approach to determine individual accommodation times based on
the assumption that the process of becoming accustomed to a prosthetic
intervention follows a similar exponential "learning curve" as many other
learning processes that have been previously investigated. Initial data collected
with a small subject sample gives some indication that gait cycle symmetry
changes along the hypothesized curve trajectory. If those preliminary results can
be confirmed it may be possible to extrapolate a subject's eventual level of
accommodation based on a small data set that is easily collected during the first
twenty minutes after introducing a prosthetic intervention.
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Langue : ANGLAIS