A Systematic Perspective of Postural Control

Maintaining a multi-jointed inverted pendulum in vertical position is an extremely challenging engineering problem. However, most healthy individuals not only can stand upright with ease, they can maintain stability during motion and under some perturbations. Many studies have shown that postural control involves very complicated interactions between many subsystems – i.e. sensory, neural, motor, and environment. It is essential to understand the contribution from each subsystem. The most important sensory inputs for postural control are from the visual, vestibular and somatosensory systems. Then the neural system has to interpret the inputs and issue appropriate commands to the muscles. Reflexes are crucial mechanisms for the body to maintain balance. Based on some postural control theories, many efforts have been spent on the investigation of postural control and many models have been proposed. However, due to the complexity of postural control, there are still ongoing researches attempting to get a better understanding of the system.