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Center-of-pressure (CoP) displacements play a key role in studies assessing postural stability. The accepted instrument to measure CoP trajectories is the force platform, but pressure-sensitive mats (PSMs) are an alternative composed of a matrix of sensitive cells. A typical cell comprises two electrodes with piezoresistive material in between, while a force platform has a force sensor at each of its corners. In this paper, we compare a homemade Velostat-based PSM and an affordable commercial mat with a commercial force platform in a test series with 42 healthy volunteers in single-legged trials (29 males, 13 females; height 1.74 (0.09) m, weight 74.3 (16.34) kg, age 31.21 (12.66) years). The aim of the research was to perform a preliminary study of the performance of our prototype to measure CoP, and more specifically, the standard deviation of the CoP path on both axes, the medial–lateral and anterior–posterior. We could thus discover several improvements for future clinical applications. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for agreement in the base experiment showed a moderate value for the prototype (0.38 to 0.63) and lower values for the commercial mat (0.11 to 0.12). However, we identified several factors that were relevant to improve ICC and reduce error by considering several processing options: (i) the known crosstalk problem between cells that appears in this kind of mats must be eliminated; (ii) the response time of the sensor has to be taken into account; and (iii) increasing the mat resolution also improves agreement. Therefore, as future work, we plan to test the improved version of the prototype in a clinical environment.

Excellence is one of the goals of Higher Education. One possible way to achieve this objective is by applying a culture based on the concepts of quality and innovation. However, the real-world application of these concepts in Higher Education teaching is a difficult task. In this paper, we present a Web tool to help teachers apply a code of good teaching practice based on the aforementioned concepts. This code has been used for several years in Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computing courses, although it could be applied to any other area. To assess this code, objective and external metrics have been used. Results show that the code helps to improve students' satisfaction as well as their academic results. Teachers' views on the code are also moderately positive.

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