The present study was designed to evaluate the effects of hippotherapy on standing balance in patients with incomplete cervical spinal cord injuries. Ten patients (8 men and 2 women) who were diagnosed with cervical levels of injury between 3 and 6, and D according to the ASIA Impairment Scale. All patients were tested by the physiotherapists prior to and after hippotherapy treatment. Standing ...

This paper presents a nonlinear controller based on a trajectory library. To generate the library, we combine two trajectory optimization methods: a parametric trajectory optimization method that finds coarse initial trajectories and Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) that further refines these trajectories and generates linear local models of the optimal control laws. To construct a contro...

The fact that we as humans are bipeds and locomote over the ground with one foot in contact (walking), no feet in contact (running), or both feet in contact (standing) creates a major challenge to our balance control system. Because two-thirds of our body mass is located two-thirds of body height above the ground we are an inherently unstable system unless a control system is continuously actin...

Human walking has previously been described as "controlled falling." Some computational models, however, suggest that gait may also have self-stabilizing aspects requiring little CNS control. The fore-aft component of walking may even be passively stable from step to step, whereas lateral motion may be unstable and require motor control for balance, as through active foot placement. If this is ...

PURPOSE To examine postural stability in glaucoma patients and subjects with no ocular disease. METHODS Twenty-four glaucoma (G) and 24 control (C) subjects participated (mean age [SD] G: 65.9 [5.5] years; C: 68.3 [5.2] years). Postural stability was measured using a force-balance platform under four conditions: eyes open/closed standing on a firm surface and eyes open/closed on a foam surfac...

Closed-loop controlled functional electrical stimulation (FES) applied to the lower limb muscles can be used as a neuroprosthesis for standing balance in neurologically impaired individuals. The objective of this study was to propose a methodology for designing a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller for FES applied to the ankle muscles toward maintaining standing balance for severa...

A computer-interfaced balance board, with facilities for data capture and analysis, and with provision for various forms of biofeedback, was built primarily as a balance retraining aid for stroke and head injury victims and for amputees. The opportunity was taken to do a modelling study of the human balance control system as it presents itself during quiet standing; to apply principles of optim...

methods in this study, 16 skilled female gymnasts (mean age of 9.62 ± 1.45 years) were randomly categorized to two general warm-up with no stretching (ns, n=8) and general warm-up plus static stretching (ss, n=8) groups. the warm-up protocol included a 10-minute jogging, and the static stretch (ss) protocol included stretching programs on the different parts of body during four weeks, three tim...

One of the most important tasks in biped robot is the balance-keeping control. A question arisen as how do our human beings make the balance-keeping possible in upright standing as human beings are the only biped-walking primates, which takes several million years of evolution period to achieve this ability. Studies on humans’ balance-keeping mechanism are not only the work of physiologists but...