Eliane Mauerberg-de CASTRO, Carolina Paioli TAVARES, C. Bruna PERICO, B. Mayara PESTANA, A. Larissa PORTO, D.A. Thais COSTA

Human Postural Stability During Dog Walking by Adults with Intellectual Disability

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether ornot walking a dog can increase stability in the walkingperformance of individuals with intellectual disability (ID).Individuals walked on a narrow balance beam, while a dogwalked parallel to them on a narrow bench. Task manipu- lations included walking with normal vision (FV) and whileblindfolded (BF), and walking with (WD) and without a dog (ND). When walking blindfolded on a narrow surface withaccompanying dog, the participants showed better pos- tural stability and gait regularity than when walking with- out a dog. Therefore, we concluded that the ID individualswere able to use the dog s leash to detect haptic proper- ties in order to achieve postural control (e.g., stability inspeed performance) while walking.

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