INTRODUCTION Many existing balance control models have adopted a single-segment inverted pendulum to model the human body, and have focused on investigating postural sway only in the sagittal plane (e.g. Maurer et al., 2005). However, evidence indicates that postural sway in the frontal plane is important, and able to account for different balance control mechanisms as well (e.g. McClenaghan et...

Any voluntary motion of the body causes an internal perturbation of balance. Load transfer during manual material handling may increase these perturbations. This study investigates effects of stance condition on postural control during lifting. Nineteen healthy subjects repeatedly lifted and lowered a load between a desk and a shelf. The base of support was varied between parallel and step stan...

The purpose of this study was to clarify the difference in muscle coactivation during postural control between older and young adults and to identify the characteristics of postural control strategies in older adults by investigating the relationship between muscle coactivation and postural control ability. Forty-six healthy older adults (82.0±7.5 years) and 34 healthy young adults (22.1±2.3 ye...

From ancient Greece to nowadays, research on posture control was guided and shaped by many concepts. Equilibrium control is often considered part of postural control. However, two different levels have become increasingly apparent in the postural control system, one level sets a distribution of tonic muscle activity ("posture") and the other is assigned to compensate for internal or external pe...

Instability, fear of falling and fall injuries are common problems for the older population and individuals with chronic disabilities. Development of screening tools and outcome measures of balance performance and fall risk has become of great interest for health professionals and researchers in the field of rehabilitation. Although linear modeling is desirable due to its simplicity, however, m...

Postural control may be an ideal physiological motor task for elucidating general questions about the organization, diversity, flexibility, and variability of biological motor behaviors using nonlinear dynamical analysis techniques. Rather than presenting "problems" to the nervous system, the redundancy of biological systems and variability in their behaviors may actually be exploited to allow ...

The postural balance system is one of the most fundamental functions for humanoid robot control. In this paper, we propose a new feedback balance control system for the human body. This system can manipulate large perturbations. It finds the optimal motion for maintaining balance in the 3D space without recieving any feed-forward input beforehand. Two different strategies are adopted for the op...

Aims: Amputation makes a person susceptible to postural deviation and compensatory movements and causes reduced performance, biocompatibility, pain, and dissatisfaction. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of eight weeks of a comprehensive rehabilitation protocol on indicators of postural control, back pain, quality of life, and gait speed in adults with unilateral lower lim...