Robotic psychophysics rig to assess, diagnose and rehabilitate the neurological causes of falls in the elderly

Falls are the leading causes of unintentional injuries in the elderly and thus a pose a major hazard to our ageing society. We present the FOHEPO (FOot HEight POsitioning) system to measure, diagnose and rehabilitate ageing-related and neurological causes of falls. We hypothesise that both perceptual and motor variability is likely to increase with age and may lead to imprecise movements causing trip overs, the major triggers of falls. Here we propose a robotic system that automatically performs measures of fall-related perceptual and motor variability in elderly subjects. Our FOHEPO platform enables us to measure and track different sources of noise in the nervous system: visual perception noise of obstacle height, proprioceptive noise of localising raising one’s foot to a desired height, noise in the visual feedback of the foot movements. The platform should eventually provide us the means to estimate fall probabilities by using these measures. Crucially, we can use the same system in game-field settings to rehabilitate elderly users moving with larger safety factors so as to reduce their risks of trip-over.