Authors:
Qian Yang
;
Bradford Diephuis
;
Virginia Chu
and
Katharine E. Forth
Affiliation:
iShoe Research Team, United States
Keyword(s):
Balance, Stabilometry, Diagnostic, Mobile.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cardiovascular Technologies
;
Computing and Telecommunications in Cardiology
;
Decision Support Systems
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Health Engineering and Technology Applications
;
Health Information Systems
;
ICT, Ageing and Disability
;
Medical and Nursing Informatics
;
Mobile Technologies
;
Mobile Technologies for Healthcare Applications
;
Neural Rehabilitation
;
Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics
;
Pervasive Health Systems and Services
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Balance deterioration is a major risk factor for falling, particularly among the elderly. Early detection of emerging balance problems can allow behavioral and medical interventions to reduce the impact and severity of balance-related incidents. The iBalance technology presents a small, mobile platform that integrates hardware and software engineering for balance monitoring at a low cost for use in the home, physical therapy office, or other point of care setting. The hardware solution has the form factor of a bathroom scale and takes the standard approach of a force plate with four load cells arranged in the corners beneath the platform. The load cells output 12-bit data to a computing device running the accompanying software. There is less scientific consensus about the most effective software solution for performing analysis on balance data. A survey of the literature reveals 16 commonly used metrics of balance derived from force plate data. Using principal component analysis, we
identify three underlying clusters of metrics from which a representative metric for each cluster may be chosen to construct an exogenous balance score. Finally, we have developed a graphical user interface for the iBalance that allows researchers to collect raw and/or processed data and view analytic visualizations of the data, with ease of extensibility for further research and analysis.
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