Dual Tasking during Trip Recovery and Obstacle Clearance among Young, Healthy Adults in Human Factors Research

Abstract

Trip-induced falls are extremely common in ergonomic settings. Such situations can lead to fatal or non-fatal injuries, affecting the workers’ quality of life and earning capacity. Dual tasking (DT) is a leading cause of trips and ineffective obstacle clearance among workers. DT increases their attentional demand, challenging both postural control and concurrent secondary tasks. As the human brain has limited attentional processing capacity, even young, healthy adults need to prioritize duties during DT. This article aimed to analyze these secondary task types and their applications in recent trip-related studies conducted on young, healthy adults. An extensive review of the recent trip-related literature was performed to provide a condensed summary of the dual tasks used. In previous trip-related literature, distinct types of secondary tasks were used. The choice of the concurrent task must be made vigilantly depending on the occupation, environmental context, available resources, and feasibility. DT can be used as a tool to train workers on selective attention, which is a lifesaving skill in ergonomic settings, especially in the occupations of roofers, construction workers, or truck drivers. Such training can result in successful obstacle clearance and trip recovery skills, which eventually minimizes the number of falls at the workplace.

Noise Interference Impacts Simple and Choice Response Times during a Lower Extremity Cognitive–Motor Task

“…Several limitations of the current study include the testing of a healthy, young population who may have a lower impact due to noise and physical workload, whereas individuals with any neurological, auditory, or vestibular disorders or an elderly population may behave differently with noise and physical workload exposure [32]. Therefore, the observed results can only be generalized to the population tested.…”

Transcranial direct current stimulation to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex improves performance of obstacle avoidance gait task

“…Stumbling over obstacles frequently occurs due to decreased toe-obstacle clearance [3] and weakened lower limb muscle power [4]; furthermore, lack of attention to obstacles is also a major factor [5,6]. Several studies examined the influence of attention on obstacle avoidance behavior by dual-task paradigm [7][8][9][10]. Lo and Chou [9] reported that the visual attention required to perform dual tasks leads to distinct modification of motor performance during obstacle crossing.…”