A Wii Bit of Fun: A Novel Platform to Deliver Effective Balance Training to Older Adults

BACKGROUND: Falls and fall-related injuries are symptomatic of an aging population. This study aimed to design, develop, and deliver a novel method of balance training, using an interactive game-based system to promote engagement, with the inclusion of older adults at both high and low risk of experiencing a fall.STUDY DESIGN: Eighty-two older adults (65 years of age and older) were recruited from sheltered accommodation and local activity groups. Forty volunteers were randomly selected and received 5 weeks of balance game training (5 males, 35 females; mean, 77.18 ± 6.59 years), whereas the remaining control participants recorded levels of physical activity (20 males, 22 females; mean, 76.62 ± 7.28 years). The effect of balance game training was measured on levels of functional balance and balance confidence in individuals with and without quantifiable balance impairments.RESULTS: Balance game training had a significant effect on levels of functional balance and balance confidence (P Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Towards a socially adaptive digital playground

We are working towards a socially adaptive digital playground for children. To this end, we are looking into nonverbal synchrony and other social signals as a measure of social behaviour and into ways to alter game dynamics to trigger and inhibit certain social behaviours. Our first results indicate that we can indeed influence social behaviours in a digital playground by changing game dynamics. Furthermore, our first results show that we will be able to sense some of these social behaviours using only computer vision techniques. I propose an iterative method for working towards a socially adaptive digital playground

THE EFFECT OF BALANCE TRAINING ON POSTURE SWAY IN MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS PATIENTS

Purpose: The multiple sclerosis disease is one of the most common progressive neurological diseases in young adults. According to this matter, that risk possibility is two or three times more than healthy people. The purpose of current study is to survey the effect of balance training on posture sway in multiple sclerosis patientsStudy method: The current study is semi-experimental. In this regard, 20 patients with multiple sclerosis from MS Society of Iran with age range of (41/8512/59) and scale score of disability progression (0-5) were participated in this study during 10 weeks (three times a week and Each session 1.5 hour). The posture sway in subjects were measured before and after practicing with static stabilometer machine, and also the paired sample t test with (P≤0.05) for results comparison was used.Results: The results of research showed that the effect of balance training on general fluctuations decrement (P= 0.000), anterior - posterior (P=0.02) and sway speed range (P=0.01) was meaningful but the exercises effect on medio-lateral sway (P=0.07) was meaningful.Conclusion: The achieved results from the study showed that the selected balance training was effective on general posture sway especially anterior–posterior.  Article visualizations

The effects of actuator selection on non-volitional postural responses to torso-based vibrotactile stimulation

Abstract Background Torso-based vibrotactile feedback may significantly reduce postural sway in balance-compromised adults during quiet standing or in response to perturbations. However, natural non-volitional postural responses to vibrotactile stimulation applied to the torso remain unknown. Methods The primary goal of this study was to determine, for two types of actuators (tactors) and in the absence of instruction, whether vibrotactile stimulation induces a directional postural shift as a function of stimulation location. Eleven healthy young adults (20 – 29 years old) were asked to maintain an upright erect posture with feet hip-width apart and eyes closed. Two types of tactors, Tactaid and C2, which differ in design and stimulation strength, were placed on the skin over the right and left external oblique, internal oblique, and erector spinae muscles in a horizontal plane corresponding approximately to the L4/L5 level. Each tactor of the same type was activated twice randomly for each individual location and twice simultaneously for all locations at a frequency of 250 Hz for a period of 5 s. Results Vibration applied over the internal oblique and erector spinae muscle locations induced a postural shift in the direction of the stimulation regardless of the tactor type. For the aforementioned four locations, the root-mean-square (RMS) and power spectral density (PSD) of the body sway in both the A/P and M/L directions were also significantly greater during the vibration than before or after, and were greater for the C2 tactors than for the Tactaid tactors. However, simultaneous activation of all tactors or those over the external oblique muscle locations did not produce significant postural responses regardless of the tactor type. Conclusion The results suggest that the use of a torso-based vibrotactile sensory augmentation display should carefully consider the tactor type as well as the instruction of corrective movements. Attractive instructional cues (“move in the direction of the vibration”) are compatible with the observed non-volitional response to stimulation and may facilitate postural adjustments during vibrotactile biofeedback balance applications.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112652/1/12984_2012_Article_451.pd

The Promise of Stochastic Resonance in Falls Prevention

Multisensory integration is essential for maintenance of motor and cognitive abilities, thereby ensuring normal function and personal autonomy. Balance control is challenged during senescence or in motor disorders, leading to potential falls. Increased uncertainty in sensory signals is caused by a number of factors including noise, defined as a random and persistent disturbance that reduces the clarity of information. Counter-intuitively, noise can be beneficial in some conditions. Stochastic resonance is a mechanism whereby a particular level of noise actually enhances the response of non-linear systems to weak sensory signals. Here we review the effects of stochastic resonance on sensory modalities and systems directly involved in balance control. We highlight its potential for improving sensorimotor performance as well as cognitive and autonomic functions. These promising results demonstrate that stochastic resonance represents a flexible and non-invasive technique that can be applied to different modalities simultaneously. Finally we point out its benefits for a variety of scenarios including in ambulant elderly, skilled movements, sports and to patients with sensorimotor or autonomic dysfunctions.Multisensory integration is essential for maintenance of motor and cognitive abilities, thereby ensuring normal function and personal autonomy. Balance control is challenged during senescence or in motor disorders, leading to potential falls. Increased uncertainty in sensory signals is caused by a number of factors including noise, defined as a random and persistent disturbance that reduces the clarity of information. Counter-intuitively, noise can be beneficial in some conditions. Stochastic resonance is a mechanism whereby a particular level of noise actually enhances the response of non-linear systems to weak sensory signals. Here we review the effects of stochastic resonance on sensory modalities and systems directly involved in balance control. We highlight its potential for improving sensorimotor performance as well as cognitive and autonomic functions. These promising results demonstrate that stochastic resonance represents a flexible and non-invasive technique that can be applied to different modalities simultaneously. Finally we point out its benefits for a variety of scenarios including in ambulant elderly, skilled movements, sports and to patients with sensorimotor or autonomic dysfunctions

CAN PROPRIOCEPTION BE IMPROVED BY EXERCISE?

The study examined if regular exercise with high demand in postural control and cyclic exercise could improve proprioception of the foot and ankle complex. A total of 38 young health people with different exercise habits for more than five years formed three groups: the ice hockey, running, and sedentary groups. Kinesthesia of the foot and ankle complex was measured in plantarflexion (PF), dorsiflexion (DF), inversion (IV) and eversion (EV) at 0.4°/s passive rotation velocity using a custom-made device. The results showed that the hockey group had significantly better kinesthesia in PF/DF, IV/EV than did the running and sedentary groups. The running group did not show better kinesthesia compared with the sedentary group. It is concluded that propiorception of foot and ankle complex can be improved by longterm exercise that has high demand for postural stability, such as ice hocke

The Impact of Power Training on Balance and Visual Feedback Removal

Because power training has been known to augment stability, the purpose of this study was to assess whether the removal of visual input affects lower limb muscle power production in young women who are resistance trained to the same degree it affects the untrained. This provided insight as far as the need for resistance training protocols in a largely untrained visually impaired population. To study this, fourteen college-aged female participants (18-23 years) performed a seated double-leg press on a leg sled machine, isolating power production of the lower limbs. After establishing baselines, which involved finding an average of power produced during five trials, the subjects were asked to close their eyes for the following set of five pushes. The power production was assessed by utilizing a Tendo Unit, with placement on one of the limbs of the machine, to measure power output during leg extension (measured in Watts). Statistics analyzed in SPSS determined the average power deficit of the athletic population to be 11.57 Watts, whereas the general population had an average power deficit of 37.43 Watts. The deficits experienced by each respective group upon visual removal were significantly different from one another, as evidenced by a p-value of .048. This accentuated the power-trained group’s resilience. A suggested training plan regimen including cardiorespiratory, resistance, flexibility, and neuromotor exercises has been appended for persons experiencing visual impairment and seeking to better their balance through power

The Acute Influence of Occupational Footwear on Balance

There is a great number of potential risks for falls and injuries because of problems in the workplace. In 2010, there were almost 3.1 million nonfatal and 646 fatal illnesses and injuries disclosed in the workplace (BLS, 2010). Fatal and nonfatal occupational injuries have decreased in the recent years but there is still much room to improve. Inappropriate footwear has been attributed to 45% of all falls (Menant et al. 2008). Past studies have shown that industrial footwear can have a detrimental effect on balance (Menant et al. 2008, Chander, Garner & Wade 2013). Occupational footwear have not been designed based on foot biomechanics but based solely on physical safety. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect different types of occupational footwear have on dynamic balance for acute bouts of time. Thirty-one healthy adult males (aged 21.2 ± 1.4 years; weight 82.6 ± 15.4 kg; height 179 ± 9.4 cm) with no musculoskeletal, orthopedic, neurological, cardiovascular, and vestibular abnormalities were examined. The participants were expected to come to two visit days. The first was a familiarization and lasted about ten minutes, while the second was the actual test and lasted about an hour. Dynamic balance was measured on the NeuroCom Equitest MCT (BWM, BWL, FWM, FWL). Latencies values were found to determine reaction times to the perturbations. Individuals were randomly assigned the three different types of footwear: work boot (WB) (mass 0.39±0.06 kg), tactical boot (TB) (mass 0.53±0.08 kg), and low-top slip-resistant shoe (LT) (mass 0.89±0.05 kg). 1 x 4 [Testing Session x Footwear Condition (BF v. LT v. TB v. WB)] RMANOVA was used to evaluate balance dependent variables. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons identified differences between footwear conditions. Significant differences were found in FWM and FWL translations, but post-hoc comparisons found no differences between footwear. Significant differences were also found in the BWL translations between the barefoot condition and TB and between the barefoot condition and WB. Both the TB and WB had a higher boot shaft height as well as increased latency values. Higher latency values mean a longer time to respond to perturbations, which could result in a fall or injury. These results would suggest that based solely on latency values that the LT is the better footwear. If these findings were combined with findings on EMG, chronic responses, and SOT, one footwear could be deemed best

Efficient reconfigurable architectures for 3-D medical image compression

Abstract Recently, the more widespread use of three-dimensional (3-D) imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound (US) have generated a massive amount of volumetric data. These have provided an impetus to the development of other applications, in particular telemedicine and teleradiology. In these �elds, medical image compression is important since both e�cient storage and transmission of data through high-bandwidth digital communication lines are of crucial importance. Despite their advantages, most 3-D medical imaging algorithms are computationally intensive with matrix transformation as the most fundamental operation involved in the transform-based methods. Therefore, there is a real need for high-performance systems, whilst keeping architectures exible to allow for quick upgradeability with real-time applications. Moreover, in order to obtain e�cient solutions for large medical volumes data, an e�cient implementation of these operations is of signi�cant importance. Recon�gurable hardware, in the form of �eld programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has been proposed as viable system building block in the construction of high-performance systems at an economical price. Consequently, FPGAs seem an ideal candidate to harness and exploit their inherent advantages such as massive parallelism capabilities, multimillion gate counts, and special low-power packages. The key achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised as follows. Two architectures for 3-D Haar wavelet transform (HWT) have been proposed based on transpose-based computation and partial recon�guration suitable for 3-D medical imaging applications. These applications require continuous hardware servicing, and as a result dynamic partial recon�guration (DPR) has been introduced. Comparative study for both non-partial and partial recon�guration implementation has shown that DPR o�ers many advantages and leads to a compelling solution for implementing computationally intensive applications such as 3-D medical image compression. Using DPR, several large systems are mapped to small hardware resources, and the area, power consumption as well as maximum frequency are optimised and improved. Moreover, an FPGA-based architecture of the �nite Radon transform (FRAT) with three design strategies has been proposed: direct implementation of pseudo-code with a sequential or pipelined description, and block random access memory (BRAM)based method. An analysis with various medical imaging modalities has been carried out. Results obtained for image de-noising implementation using FRAT exhibits promising results in reducing Gaussian white noise in medical images. In terms of hardware implementation, promising trade-o�s on maximum frequency, throughput and area are also achieved. Furthermore, a novel hardware implementation of 3-D medical image compression system with context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) has been proposed. An evaluation of the 3-D integer transform (IT) and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with lifting scheme (LS) for transform blocks reveal that 3-D IT demonstrates better computational complexity than the 3-D DWT, whilst the 3-D DWT with LS exhibits a lossless compression that is signi�cantly useful for medical image compression. Additionally, an architecture of CAVLC that is capable of compressing high-de�nition (HD) images in real-time without any bu�er between the quantiser and the entropy coder is proposed. Through a judicious parallelisation, promising results have been obtained with limited resources. In summary, this research is tackling the issues of massive 3-D medical volumes data that requires compression as well as hardware implementation to accelerate the slowest operations in the system. Results obtained also reveal a signi�cant achievement in terms of the architecture e�ciency and applications performance

The Effect of Vibrotactile Feedback on Healthy People and People with Vestibular Disorders during Dual-task Conditions

Vibrotactile feedback (VTF) has been shown to improve balance performance in healthy people and people with vestibular disorders in a single-task experimental condition. However, typical balance activities occur in a multi-task environment. Dual-task performance can degrade with age and in people with vestibular disorders. It is unclear if the ability to use VTF might be affected by dual-task conditions in different age groups and people with vestibular disorders. The purposes of this dissertation are to investigate in healthy young and older adults, and people with vestibular disorders: 1) balance performance in a dual-task paradigm under various sensory conditions while using VTF, 2) reaction time during dual-task performance under different sensory conditions while using VTF, and 3) the effect of testing duration and visit on VTF use. Three study visits were included in this dissertation study: one screening visit and two experimental visits. Twenty younger and twenty older subjects were recruited in the first study to determine if VTF was affected by age. Seven people with unilateral vestibular hypofunction (UVH) and seven age-matched controls were recruited in the second study to investigate the effect of vestibular dysfunction. The results showed that young and older adults use VTF differently, depending on the underlying sensory integration balance task. Older adults increased postural sway during fixed platform conditions, but both young and older adults decreased postural sway during sway-referenced platform conditions. Reaction times on the secondary cognitive tasks increased more while using the VTF in older adults compared with young adults. This finding suggested that using VTF requires greater attention in older adults. The trial duration and visit also affected postural sway performance while VTF was applied. Similar postural sway results were found when comparing people with UVH and age-matched controls. However, no group difference was found between people with UVH and age-matched controls in the magnitude of postural sway, which suggested that people with UVH were able to use VTF under dual-task conditions similar to normal adults. Our data also indicated that people with UVH require more attentional resources to perform secondary cognitive tasks while using VTF