This study was carried on thirty normal elderly (above the age of 60 years) individuals, and forty normal young adults (20-40 years). All individuals were subjected to: thorough history taking, neurological examination and full routine laboratory studies, functional tests for postural stability and balance (Standing Balance Scale, Berg Balance Scale, Rivermead Mobility Index). Laboratory evalua...

Postural control after applying perturbation involves neural and muscular efforts to limit the center of mass (CoM) motion. Linear dynamical approaches may not unveil all complexities of body efforts. This study was aimed at determining two nonlinear dynamics parameters (fractal dimension (FD) and largest Lyapunov exponent (LLE)) in addition to the linear standing metrics of balance in perturbe...

Human standing balance is a complex of systems, like the muscles, nervous system and sensory systems, interacting with each other in a closed loop to maintain upright stance. With age, disease and medication use these systems deteriorate, which could result in impaired balance. In this paper, it is demonstrated that multi-input-multi-output closed loop system identification techniques (MIMO-CLS...

Recently, interest in the mechanisms underlying balance recovery following stroke has grown, because insight into these mechanisms is necessary to develop effective rehabilitation strategies for different types of stroke. Studies dealing with the recovery of standing balance from stroke are, however, limited to rehabilitation inpatients with a unilateral supratentorial brain infarction or haemo...

We investigated how postural responses to galvanic vestibular stimulation were affected by standing on a translating support surface and by somatosensory loss due to diabetic neuropathy. We tested the hypothesis that an unstable surface and somatosensory loss can result in an increase of vestibulospinal sensitivity. Bipolar galvanic vestibular stimulation was applied to subjects who were standi...

The development of a physiologically plausible computational model of a neural controller that can realize a human-like biped stance is important for a large number of potential applications, such as assisting device development and designing robotic control systems. In this paper, we develop a computational model of a neural controller that can maintain a musculoskeletal model in a standing po...

The control of standing is a complicated task that involves the action of muscles distributed over the whole body. Forces arising from gravity, external events or our own actions all tend to disturb the unstable equilibrium that preserves posture. For the central nervous system the problem of standing can be cast in terms of finding appropriate relations among body segments to maintain the desi...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the intrasession reliability of center of pressure (COP) parameters calculated from force platform measurements. DESIGN A cross-sectional study. SETTING Gait and balance laboratory. PARTICIPANTS Community-dwelling healthy older adults (N=63) above the age of 62 years (mean age, 78.74 y). INTERVENTIONS Not applicable. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES COP was estimated fro...

Two telemeterized femoral components were implanted in two patients as part of normal total hip replacement procedures. The two components were instrumented to measure the three force components directed along: (a) the neck axis, (b) transverse to the neck axis and in the plane of the prosthesis, and (c) transverse to the neck axis and perpendicular to the plane of the prosthesis. Data were col...

A medial linkage device called Primewalk was developed by Saitoh et al. to connect two KneeAnkle-Foot Orthoses (KAFOs). This device enabled to improve for paraplegic gait not only using orthosis but addition to functional electrical stimulation (FES). The purpose is to investigate the postural stability with the Primewalk device liked KAFOs in a paraplegic patient using FES. The complete T8 par...