Research Project Doctoral Candidate 12

State estimation and dealing with noise and uncertainty

 

Fellow

Constanze Dammeyer

 

Host Institution

University of Bern, Department of Movement and Exercise Science

 

Supervisor

Prof. Ernst-Joachim Hossner

Dr. Stephan Zahno

 

Project description

Aging is associated with increased sensory and motor noise, requiring older adults to manage everyday tasks—such as walking to the bus station—under greater uncertainty. This becomes particularly challenging when they must adapt to unexpected situations. The aim of this project is to advance our understanding of the mechanisms and strategies older adults use to deal with uncertainty and to develop novel training approaches.

 

(Planned) Secondment

University of Münster

Project Updates

June 2025

Our experimental paradigm involves a joint walking task in which participants are asked to coordinate their steps with a leader (Figure 1), without knowing in advance how many steps will be taken. This creates a situation of uncertainty, requiring real-time coordination.

In the first study, we manipulate the availability of sensory information (Figure 2) to examine participants’ reliance on different sensory modalities. We also investigate whether performance and coordination strategies differ between older adults with dance experience and an age-matched control group.

In the next step, we will examine how these strategies evolve with learning, and whether improvements in the joint walking task transfer to general gait parameters in other walking tasks. In a third step, we aim to develop and validate an extended reality (XR) version of the task that can be used independently by older adults to train stable and adaptable walking behaviour.

Currently, the first data is collected—comparing older adults with dance experience to a control group. In parallel, the development of the XR-task and a scoping literature review are in progress.