New Perspectives in Instrumental Balance Assessment

Dear Colleagues,

The study of human upright stance control historically represents one of the bases of human biomechanics, and despite its long history, it is still a valuable source of information regarding the inner mechanisms devoted to balance maintenance. Balance impairment is a common feature recognizable in subjects presenting a wide spectrum of disorders, affecting the vestibular, musckuloskeletal, and neurological system. Further, elderly people can also be affected to different degrees by disorders of balance, to which the most common concerns associated include falls, leading to a series of related consequences which can significantly lower the subject’s quality of life, such as morbidity, fear of falling or traumas. The instrumented evaluation of upright stance, or posturography, is widely used to investigate the control of balance developed through active and passive mechanisms, and it can be applied in unperturbed or perturbed conditions. The former refers to a postural assessment performed when a subject maintains balance without any external disruption, while the latter indicates the use of externally imposed balance perturbations, administered in a number of different ways, such as visual perturbations, mechanical perturbations or proprioceptive perturbations. Physiological data acquired during these kinds of posturographic trials, which are typically kinetic, kinematic, and electromyographic signals, can be analyzed through a number of different techniques, based on different domains, with the goal of extracting information about the subject’s response to the abovementioned internal or external perturbations affecting balance. Eventually, a control theory-based approach can also be used, in conjunction with identification procedures, in order to model how the central nervous system manages both upright stance maintenance and the perturbation withstanding. This kind of analysis can provide insights into the inner nature of the model and its potential changes depending on the considered tested population, e.g., healthy and pathological individuals, elderly people, and children as well.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collect original research papers or critical reviews dealing with the most recent and cutting-edge developments in this field. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Advanced techniques for posturographic data analysis;
• Theoretical posture modeling and control;
• New technological developments for balance assessment;
• Machine learning approach in posture data analysis.

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• Biomechanics
• Static and dynamic posture
• Human balance modeling
• Physiological signal processing
• Postural strategies