earticle

영어

The purpose of this study was to determine whether postural control would differ under various gaze tasks while standing in a wide or nar-row stance between healthy young and old people, and also investigate whether postural sway and cognitive workload are affected by dual- task balance. Ten young and 10 healthy old people participated in this study. Each participant stood upright under four gaze conditions (fixa-tion, saccade, pursuit, vestibular-ocular reflex) and two stance condi-tions (wide and narrow stance) in a total of 16 trials. Postural sway was measured by the mean sway amplitude of the center of pressure in the medial-lateral and anteriorposterior directions. Cognitive workload was measured through pupil response as an index of cognitive activity (ICA) by using Eye tracking system and Eyeworks. The results showed that postural sway significantly reduced when performing saccadic eye movement in both groups but greater postural sway was evoked in ves-tibular-ocular reflex condition. In addition, although old people had a significant increase in ICA compared to the young, there were no sig-nificant differences among all the gaze conditions in old people. These results confirmed that saccadic eye movements are the most beneficial for reducing postural sway regardless of aging and also provide some insight that pupil response represents an indicator of cognitive workload during dual-task balance context. These findings suggest that eye move-ment exercises may be considered as an effective intervention to im-prove postural control so a fall prevention program applying eye move-ment should be extended to individuals who are at risk of falling.