Do rhythmic auditory stimuli enhance recovery against unexpected perturbations? a novel approach to quantify resilience during walking

Maintaining stability in the presence of unexpected external perturbations is essential during walking. Systemic resilience, the capacity to timely recover from perturbations, is therefore achieved by suitable foot placement facilitating correction to the base of support relative to the body center of mass (COM). By evaluating the temporal evolution of COM velocity trajectories, we demonstrate how foot placement seems to depend on the state of previous steps (on average ~8s) and how different auditory stimulations regulate resilience, inviting a fundamental rethinking about our neuromuscular controller models used for predicting walking behavior.