Introduction: most of researches showed that the inability of older adults to maintain their balance with doing cognitive activity simultaneously, causes decrease in motor and cognitive function and induce bad incident such as falling, so the aim of this study is surveying the effect of dual task with variable priority balance training on the speed of walking and fear of falling in older adults.
Methodology: The method of current study was semi experimental. The participants were 24 available and eligible healthy older adults of Kerman city with the age of 65 and up to which simple randomly selected and randomly divided into dual task with variable priority group (in the half of the training session more concentrate on the cognitive task and in other half of training session more concentrate on the motor task) and control group(doing the balance training without any cognitive task) based on TUG scale scores randomly and each group consist of 12 older adults. The training program includes gait, transition and balance activity which is our training groups received 45 minute individualized training session, 3 times a week for one month (4 weeks). For evaluating the speed of walking we used TUG test and for evaluating fear of falling we used fall efficacy scale (Yardeli &et al, 2005). For analysis data we use ANCOVA and Bunfforeni test.
Results: the results showed that there is a significance differences between dual task with variable priority training group and control group in TUG test but there is no significance difference between this two groups in fear of falling, although both of our groups significantly improved with regard to their pretest.
Discussion: With regard to the results of current study, we suggested to the planners in the field of aging to design the training based on the dual task paradigm especially the training which consider the switching attention ability for improving the individual cognitive and divided attention ability and with this improvement the fall risk in older adult was decreased. On the other hands the balance training induces decrease in fear of falling and improve the self- balance confidence of older adults