Daily activity almost always includes doing two things at once, such as walking and talking or driving and finding a place to go. Two very basic activities that need continuous and precise tuning are locomotion and breathing. In most animals, mechanical constraints on breathing lead to strong coupling or synchronization with locomotion. Lizards, for example can only run and breathe in alternation. In human locomotion, there is more flexibility in how breathing and locomotion are coordinated. However, many of the muscles involved in breathing also control the stability of the torso and the torso plays its own role in stability during locomotion. Interconnections run in all directions and the problem of coordination is complex to say the least.
With NSF support Dr. Richard Van Emmerik, Dr. Joseph Hamill and Dr. Patty Freedson, together with postdoctoral fellow Dr. William McDermott, will investigate how people coordinate respiration and locomotion under a variety of circumstances. A focus of the research is to assess how people adapt coordination in different movement tasks. The tasks manipulate the degree of difficulty for walking and examine the impact on coordination between locomotion and respiration. A very important question for this research is how this coordination affects the stability of locomotion. Broader impacts of the research are in the areas of learning strategies for physical activity across the lifespan, prevention of falls in older individuals, and rehabilitation from accidents and for people afflicted with movement and respiratory disorders.
