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

Abstract

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.

Bidirectional associations between word memory and one-legged balance performance in mid and later life

“…As balance ability relies on input from visual, vestibular and proprioceptive sources, age-related changes in the ability to perceive these sensory inputs could also explain a weakening association between cognition and balance at older ages. Given that balance may have a greater reliance on visual input at older ages ( Púcik et al, 2014 ; Saftari and Kwon, 2018 ; Yeh et al, 2014 ), one would expect that visual acuity would explain more variation in balance performance compared with cognitive processes. Replication of these analyses in older adults with eyes open tests may inform how the roles of visual input and subsequent processing in balance change with age.…”

Processing moving visual scenes during upright stance in elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment

“…Previous research on visual stimulation usually employed sinusoidal stimuli (Peterka & Benolken, 1995;Mergner et al, 2005;Dokka et al, 2010). Other known stimulation scenes rotated an image around the horizontal plane (Day et al, 2016), or created and tested multiple scenes that closely resembled situations that could provoke postural disturbance (Pucik et al, 2014). However, these scenes did not elicit the expected response.…”