Use of Nintendo Wii Balance Board for posturographic analysis of Multiple Sclerosis patients with minimal balance impairment

Abstract

BackgroundThe Wii Balance Board (WBB) has been proposed as an inexpensive alternative to laboratory-grade Force Plates (FP) for the instrumented assessment of balance. Previous studies have reported a good validity and reliability of the WBB for estimating the path length of the Center of Pressure. Here we extend this analysis to 18 balance related features extracted from healthy subjects (HS) and individuals affected by Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with minimal balance impairment.MethodsEighteen MS patients with minimal balance impairment (Berg Balance Scale 53.3 ± 3.1) and 18 age-matched HS were recruited in this study. All subjects underwent instrumented balance tests on the FP and WBB consisting of quiet standing with the eyes open and closed. Linear correlation analysis and Bland-Altman plots were used to assess relations between path lengths estimated using the WBB and the FP. 18 features were extracted from the instrumented balance tests. Statistical analysis was used to assess significant differences between the features estimated using the WBB and the FP and between HS and MS. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to evaluate the validity and the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient was used to assess the reliability of WBB measures with respect to the FP. Classifiers based on Support Vector Machines trained on the FP and WBB features were used to assess the ability of both devices to discriminate between HS and MS.ResultsWe found a significant linear relation between the path lengths calculated from the WBB and the FP indicating an overestimation of these parameters in the WBB. We observed significant differences in the path lengths between FP and WBB in most conditions. However, significant differences were not found for the majority of the other features. We observed the same significant differences between the HS and MS populations across the two measurement systems. Validity and reliability were moderate-to-high for all the analyzed features. Both the FP and WBB trained classifier showed similar classification performance (>80%) when discriminating between HS and MS.ConclusionsOur results support the observation that the WBB, although not suitable for obtaining absolute measures, could be successfully used in comparative analysis of different populations.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12984-017-0230-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Treinamento Cognitivo de Atenção e Memória de Universitários Com Jogos Eletrônicos

“…Os jogos eletrônicos são dispositivos computacionais desenvolvidos prioritariamente para entretenimento, que geram grande polêmica sobre o seu impacto no comportamento social dos jogadores (Baum & Maraschin, 2017) e frequentemente somente aspectos negativos dos jogos, tais como agressividade e vício são investigados (Gnambs & Appel, 2017). Fora dos aspectos controversos, os jogos têm mostrado impacto positivo como forma de treinamento cognitivo (Steenbergen, Sellaro, Stock, Beste, & Colzato, 2015;Kristjánsson, 2013;Chiappe, Conger, Liao, Caldwell, & Vu, 2013;Mishra, Bavelier, & Gazzaley, 2012;Bavelier, Achtman, Mani, & Focker, 2012;Nouchi et al, 2013;Boot, Kramer, Simons, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2008), treinamento físico (Severini et al, 2017), melhoria de condições emocionais (Francis, Comello, & Marshall, 2016), mudanças de hábitos alimentares em crianças e adolescentes (Thompson et al, 2015) e reabilitação de substâncias (Cutter et al, 2014).…”

Reliability of Wii Balance Board and Microsoft Kinect for Capturing Posturographic Information During Balance Tests

“…Therefore, it was possible to measure the agreement between the distributions of the two sets. (Clark et al, 2010;Bower et al, 2014;Severini et al 2017). For, CCC, scores greater than .69 was interpreted in the satisfactory range as used in Larsen et al (2014).…”

“…Recent studies have been using WBB as a tool for analysing body balance and body oscillation variables (Bartlett et al, 2014;Sgrò et al, 2014, Castelli et al, 2015Severini et al, 2017). Reliability of WBB was tested in healthy young and older subjects, stroke survivors, visual impaired and multiple sclerosis patients (Clark et al, 2018).…”

“…Posturographic analysis related to semi-static balance 1 tests can be performed using WBB through the identification of trajectory, path length and velocity of the center of pressure (CoP) among other characteristics associated to body oscillation. In the same way as Kinect, WBB has been used in balance tests in healthy young and elderly adults (Clark et al, 2010;Chang et al, 2013) and unhealthy individuals with multiple sclerosis (Castelli et al, 2015;Severini et al, 2017), visual impairment (Jeter et al, 2015), or chronic stroke (Kaewkaen et al, 2018). There are evidences that support the use of Kinect and WBB to acquire reliable and valid posturographic data (Ruff et al, 2015).…”

“…This coefficient indicates that values close to zero mean no reliability, while values close to 1, a perfect reliability. Scores are considered poor when <.40 and excellent when >.75 for evaluating reliability of balance tests (Clark et al, 2010;Bower et al, 2014;Severini et al 2017). Additionally, some authors (Bartlett et al 2014;Clark et al, 2018) not only recommended the use of Kinect and WBB for balance assessment tests when lower accuracy and precision is acceptable, but also tested the integrated solution on balance tests in old subjects (Yang et al, 2016).…”