Wearable sensors are de facto revolutionizing the assessment of standing balance. The aim of this work is to review the state-of-the-art literature that adopts this new posturographic paradigm, i.e., to analyse human postural sway through inertial sensors directly worn on the subject body. After a systematic search on PubMed and Scopus databases, two raters evaluated the quality of 73 full-text articles, selecting 47 high-quality contributions. A good inter-rater reliability was obtained (Cohen’s kappa = 0.79). This selection of papers was used to summarize the available knowledge on the types of sensors used and their positioning, the data acquisition protocols and the main applications in this field (e.g., “active aging”, biofeedback-based rehabilitation for fall prevention, and the management of Parkinson’s disease and other balance-related pathologies), as well as the most adopted outcome measures. A critical discussion on the validation of wearable systems against gold standards is also presented.

This research demonstrates the feasibility of a markerless kinematic analysis of the poling gesture on a contest field. Results point out a wide variability of the gesture due to the residual functional capabilities and sitting postures of each athlete. However, the poling cycles of subjects classified into different classes present similar features. An original segmentation of the DP gesture in a sequence of 3 phases is proposed in the article.

2016-12-23T18:37:48

No abstract

This paper describes a novel parallel robotic structure with six degrees of freedom, whose end effector is driven by nine wires operated by motors: the WiRo-6.3. The ideas that led to the conception of the robot are thoroughly discussed and analyzed. The workspace of WiRo-6.3 has been numerically analyzed, and it is significantly larger than the one of other analogous seven-wire structures. The forward and inverse kinematics are both solved in closed form.