There are risks associated with this study.  Examples of injuries you might sustain while falling onto a padded mat while wearing a VR headset include:

• Motion sickness
• Mild skin laceration or bruising
• Mild body trauma
• Sprained wrist
• Sprained ankle

We have made provisions to minimize these risks by requiring that you wear a helmet, facemask, elbow, and knee pads

Our protocol requires you to wear virtual reality (VR) headset so you will not see where you are walking with respect to the laboratory walking path. There are potential risks that come with using VR headsets.  The use of VR head-coupled systems is known to cause nausea in some people.  You will only have the VR headset engaged during the moving period of each walking exercise, which is expected to span no more than 10 seconds per trial.  As soon as you feel dizzy or nauseous let the RA know so he or she can remove your VR headset until you feel better. The RA will have a supply of health nausea bags with refreshing wipes available in the event you experience severe nausea.  Otherwise, the trial will continue, and the headset will be removed by the RA once you stop moving, either from a fall or when the RA instructs you to halt.  We allow 5 minutes per walking trial so the RA can verify correct fit of all protective equipment (helmet, elbow and knee pads), download sensor data to a local laptop, and reset the VR scene.  You will wear the VR headset for a period of under one minute during each 5-minute trial.

We may discover new information during this research study. This new information my affect whether you want to still be in the study. We will tell you so that you can decide if you still want to be in the research.