Design and development of a novel balancer with variable difficulty for training and evaluation

This paper presents a novel, portable and cost-effective balance trainer with the necessary important features to improve the reach of rehabilitation to the masses. There are three factors that contribute to a person's ability to maintain standing balance: Proprioceptive feedback (from the joints), vision, and the vestibular system. These systems can be affected by injury, infection, or brain damage caused by stroke. One example of such injuries is ankle injury. A large focus of the physiotherapy and sports medicine community is using postural-control tasks to prevent, assess and rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, there are presently two extreme ends of balance training devices. On one end, there is high-end equipment which only large hospitals are capable of buying. On the other end are the simple balance boards which offer limited features. To develop the new balance trainer - the Pro.Balance - therapists at the Singapore General Hospital drafted a new 'wish list' of requirements. The prototype was built at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and was commercialized by Lab Rehab Pte Ltd as the Pro.Balance. The device has a small footprint, incorporating only the most important and frequently used functions. These functions include being able to provide different levels of difficulty, setting different difficulties in different directions, the storing of a patient's performance, real-time visual feedback to aid the patient and different types of modes for different purposes. Springs are used to vary the amount of supporting moments, thus varying the difficulty levels. This paper describes the design and features of the Pro.Balance.