- Postural strategy
- Postural feedback control
- Postural adaptation to perturbation
- Balance performance assessment
Human shows adjustment of postural control in response to various types of perturbation. For example, in upright postural control, human takes strategy change from ankle to hip in response to increasing perturbation. Different amount of pertur-bation employs different postural strategy because of biomechanical constraint indicating some sorts of functioning limitations like actuator saturation or fatigue problem. The goal of this research is to examine how the central nervous system adjusts postural balance for a variety of perturbation types and quantify the adjustment mechanism. Specifically, we investigate 1) how the normal vs. balance disorder patients adjust multi-segmental posture to various perturbations, and also 2) study on how the sensory cues help to make postural adaptation. Output of this study is expected to help providing balance performance index to assess postural performance of the elderly or patients, or when it is applied to robotics field, to help designing robust balancing control algorithm mimicking human control adaptation.
