Rambling and trembling in quiet standing

The goal of this study was to explore the rambling-trembling decomposition in quiet standing. The center of pressure (COP) and the horizontal ground reaction force (F(hor)) were registered in healthy subjects standing in an upright bipedal posture on a force platform. The COP positions at the instants when F(hor) = 0 were identified (instant equilibrium points, IEP) for the anterior-posterior direction, then the COP time series, were partitioned into its components using 2 different techniques, rambling-trembling decomposition and gravity line decomposition. The two decomposition techniques provided very similar results. An unexpectedly large correlation between the trembling trajectory and the difference between COP and gravity line was found, r = 0.91 (range, 0.83 < r < 0.98). The correlation implies that the GL moves from an IEP to the subsequent IEP along a smooth trajectory that can be predicted by the spline approximation. A substantial negative cross-correlation at a zero time lag was observed between the trembling and the F(hor), -0.90 < r < -0.75. For the rambling trajectory, the coefficients of correlation with F(hor) were low, -0.33 < r < -0.05. The data support the hypothesis that during quiet standing the body sways for two reasons: the migration of the reference point (rambling) and the deviation away from that point (trembling).