Functional Gait Assessment (FGA)

The FGA is a standardised test for assessing gait performance (20), during 10 activities including walking with head turns, eyes closed, and stepping over obstacles. Each of the 10 FGA items is scored from zero, for severe impairment, to three for normal performance (21). A cut-off score of 22/30 classifies fall risk and predicts unexplained falls in community-dwelling older adults within 6 months (21). The FGA was performed under two conditions:

1) Standard FGA, completed first, in a silent environment.

2) Auditory FGA, completed second, performed in the presence of an informational noise masker (i.e., noise with an informational content). A multi-speaker babble noise was used since this is the most common environmental background noise where listeners report problems (22). The babble noise masker was a mix of two separate continuous discourses by two independent speakers that were telling a different story. The noise was delivered to the subject's ears at comfortable hearing levels via plastic ear pods, which were connected to a Blu HD 6.0 Android phone. Participants were instructed to perform the FGA while listening to the babble, but were not given any related tasks or asked to listen actively to the babble.