Olsen, SharonMcLaren, RuthScrooby, AidanShaikh, NusratnaazHenare, DionTaylor, DeniseChaudhary, Shikha2026-04-142026-04-142026-03-16BMC Geriatrics, ISSN: 1471-2318 (Print); 1471-2318 (Online), BMC, 26(1). doi: 10.1186/s12877-026-07214-21471-23181471-2318http://hdl.handle.net/10292/20919Background: Dual task (DT) assessments evaluating walking combined with a cognitive task are valuable tools for testing functional capacity and monitoring age-related decline. Despite this, motor-cognitive DT assessments are underutilised in clinical practice. This has been attributed in part to methodological challenges, including heterogeneity in DT measurement protocols and poor reliability of outcome measures. To address these barriers, this scoping review systematically identified motor-cognitive DT walking assessments used with healthy older adults and examined current practice in reporting and standardisation. The purpose was to inform the refinement of DT assessments to enhance their precision and reproducibility, facilitating their future integration into routine clinical practice. Method: A systematic search of five electronic databases identified studies that investigated motor-cognitive DT walking assessments in community-dwelling, cognitively healthy older adults. The reporting and standardisation of measurement procedures was extracted using the COSMIN framework. The findings were analysed descriptively. Results: The review included 38 studies investigating a walking motor task combined with a variety of cognitive tasks. The most common walking tasks were unidirectional gait, the timed up and go (TUG), or walking and turning tasks. The most prevalent cognitive tasks included serial subtraction, animal naming, and reciting alternate alphabet letters. There was substantial variability in the administration of DT assessments and no studies fully reported the procedures for set up, test performance, and data collection. Of particular concern was the poor reporting of general task instructions, task prioritisation, and practice trials. Conclusion: The review identified a lack of standardisation in DT walking measurement procedures, which likely contributes to measurement variability and limits clinical replication. Given that measurement variability inherent in single task assessments is compounded when motor and cognitive tasks are combined, it is critical to address these sources of inconsistency to ensure DT measures detect and accurately reflect true performance changes. Recommendations are made to improve standardisation of DT measurements with the aim of facilitating their broader adoption and implementation in clinical practice.Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Dual taskgaitmeasurement variabilitymotor-cognitiveolder adultwalking4201 Allied Health and Rehabilitation Science42 Health SciencesAgingClinical ResearchBehavioral and Social ScienceBasic Behavioral and Social ScienceGeneric health relevanceNeurological1103 Clinical Sciences1106 Human Movement and Sports SciencesGeriatrics3202 Clinical sciences4203 Health services and systems4206 Public healthJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.1186/s12877-026-07214-2