Getting Seniors Back on Their Bicycle; a Pretest-posttest Case-control Study on the Improvement of Bicycle Balance Control

Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging

Status: Completed

Conditions: Balance Control in Elderly

Treatments: Behavioral: Bicycle balance control training

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT07195526

DCC.2024.00080

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study investigates the effectiveness of an intervention that aims at restoring bicycle balance control skills in seniors that have quit cycling. The intervention will last 11 weeks and involves three components: (1) training on an exercise bicycle, (2) a balance control training on a bicycle simulator, and (3) cycling on the public roads with a safe start-and-stop technique that was practiced on the bicycle simulator. In the bicycle simulator training, the difficulty of the balance control will be increased gradually, slowly approaching the difficulty of bicycle balance control on the public roads.

Enrollment: 23 patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Persons that stopped cycling at least six months ago and want to get back on their bicycle.

Exclusion criteria

• Balance-relevant sensory disorders (peripheral neuropathy, labyrinthitis, vestibular neuritis, …)

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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23 participants in 2 patient groups

Bicycle balance control training

Experimental group

Description:

The intervention involveds three components: (1) training on an exercise bicycle, (2) a balance control training on a bicycle simulator, and (3) cycling on the public roads with a safe start-and-stop technique that will be practiced on the bicycle simulator. In the bicycle simulator training, the difficulty of the balance control was increased gradually, slowly approaching the difficulty of bicycle balance control on the public roads.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Bicycle balance control training

Control group

No Intervention group

Description:

The participants in the experimental group are matched to the participants in the control group. The control group participants are selected based on their distance from the location of the intervention; control group participants live farther away from the location of the intervention as compared to the experimental group.