Preliminary Experimental Analysis of Reservoir Computing Approach for Balance Assessment

Evaluation of balance stability in elderly people is of prominent relevance in the field of health monitoring. Recently, the use of Wii Balance Board has been proposed as valid alternative to clinical balance tests, such as the widely used Berg Balance Scale (BBS) test, allowing to measure and analyze static features such as the duration or the speed of assessment of patients’ center of pressure. In an innovative way, in this paper we propose to take into consideration the whole temporal information generated by the balance board, analyzing it by means of dynamical neural networks. In particular, using Recurrent Neural Networks implemented according to the Reservoir Computing paradigm, we propose to estimate the BBS score from the temporal data generated by the execution of one simple exercise on the balance board. Preliminary experimental assessments of the proposed approach on a real-world dataset show promising results.