Effects of supportive hand contact on reactive postural control during support perturbations

There are many everyday situations in which a supportive hand contact is required for an individual to counteract various postural perturbations. By emulating situations when balance of an individual is challenged, we examined functional role of supportive hand contact at different locations where balance of an individual was perturbed by translational perturbations of the support surface. We examined the effects of handle location, perturbation direction and perturbation intensity on the postural control and the forces generated in the handle. There were significantly larger centre-of-pressure (CoP) displacements for perturbations in posterior direction than for perturbations in anterior direction. Besides, the perturbation intensity significantly affected the peak CoP displacement in both perturbation directions. However, the position of the handle had no effects on the peak CoP displacement. On the contrary, there were significant effects of perturbation direction, perturbation intensity and handle position on the maximal force in the handle. The effect of the handle position was significant for the perturbations in posterior direction where the lowest maximal forces were recorded in the handle located at the shoulder height. They were comparable to the forces in the handle at eye height and significantly lower than the forces in the handle located either lower or further away from the shoulder. In summary, our results indicate that although the location of a supportive hand contact has no effect on the peak CoP displacement of healthy individuals, it affects the forces that an individual needs to exert on the handle in order to counteract support perturbations.