Can dance reduce falls-risk in older adults with mild cognitive impairment?

In 2018, MIRA and the LCMA held a competition to identify the inaugural Labarge Postdoctoral Fellow in Mobility; Dr. Patricia Hewston was the successful candidate. The vision for Patricia’s project is to build infrastructure and capacity to initiate a program in aging and mobility with a technology that measures gait called GAITRite to inform best practices for falls prevention to optimize mobility and well-being of older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). MCI can be a transitional state between cognitively intact and dementia and is associated with double the risk of falls compared to those without MCI.  Falls can result in declines in mobility, activity avoidance, institutionalization, and mortality. Given the importance of preventing falls in older adults with MCI, simple yet highly predictive technologies are advantageous to provide precise and standardized feedback to assess and track change in fall risk before and after intervention and inform best practices for fall prevention.