Assessment of Visual Reliance in Balance Control: An Inexpensive Extension of the Static Posturography

Ability of humans to maintain balance in an upright stance and during movement activities is one of the most natural skills affecting everyday life. This ability progressively deteriorates with increasing age, and balance impairment, often aggravated by age-related diseases, can result in falls that adversely impact the quality of life. Falls represent serious problems of health concern associated with aging. Many investigators, involved in different science disciplines such as medicine, engineering, psychology, and sport, have been attracted by a research of the human upright stance. In a clinical practice, stabilometry based on the force plate is the most widely available procedure used to evaluate the balance. In this paper, we have proposed a low-cost extension of the conventional stabilometry by the multimedia technology that allows identifying potentially disturbing effects of visual sensory information. Due to the proposed extension, a stabilometric assessment in terms of line integral of center of pressure (COP) during moving scene stimuli shows higher discrimination power between young healthy and elderly subjects with supposed stronger visual reliance.