Standing Balance Assessment by Measurement of Body Center of Gravity Using Smartphones

Abstract

Assessment of balance by means of posturographic analysis is frequently used in the clinical practice for evaluating the risk of falls or as an indicator of balance-related disorders. The development of automatic, affordable and accurate systems for gauging balance capabilities in the elderly is deemed a crucial step towards the adoption of prevention strategies and the reduction of associated social costs, especially in a context of growing average age of population. In this article we propose to exploit signals that can be collected from sensors on board of common consumer-grade smartphones for posturographic analysis. To this aim, we introduce several processing algorithms for extracting useful information from the acceleration data streams, and we also present an assessment framework based on the comparison of the trajectory of the body center of gravity, estimated from embedded triaxial accelerometers, with a homologous counterpart, estimated from the reference plate force, thus adding to the consistency of the whole process. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system in terms of its capability of achieving signals and posturographic features which agree with those obtained by means of balance board platforms, potentially opening the way to novel research studies and applications of mobile technology in this field.

Toward the InterPlanetary Health Layer for the Internet of Medical Things With Distributed Ledgers and Storages

“…Starting from the SWP the Balance application automatically extracts global and structural parameters: the former belongs to methods whose aim is to estimate the overall size and features of the sway patterns, while the latter is based on the decomposition of sway trajectories into sub-units that can potentially be related by their role w.r.t. the underlying motor control processes [44]. For the complete list of the numerical features collected by Balance refer to Table 2 while the complete source code of the application can be found at: https: // github.com/ ComputerScienceUniUrb/ balance-mobile.…”

Decentralising the Internet of Medical Things with Distributed Ledger Technologies and Off-Chain Storages: A Proof of Concept

“…Balance is a IoMT smartphone application that records the human postural stability indices of an individual through the sensors integrated within the smartphone. It aims to produce a stabilometric analysis by referencing the biomechanical model of the single inverse pendulum and the available traditional healthcare technology in the field [11]. The stabilometric analysis allows evaluating the patient's stability in the upright position by studying the dynamics of the center of gravity projection on a plane parallel to the ground.…”

“…In this work, we try to give a possible solution based on DLTs and off-chain storages to decentralise the IoMT and enable a secure data sharing mechanism across the IoMT network. We will show how this solution could work beside an IoMT smartphone application called "Balance", based on the work of E. Lattanzi et al [11]. The work is structured as follows: Section 1, the introduction; Section 2, the case study; Section 3, the proposed solution; Section 4, the discussion and conclusions.…”