Can Virtual Reality Help Us Prevent Falls in the Elderly and Others?
From: Medical Design Technology - 04/20/2017

For the elderly and people with neurodegenerative conditions, balance is not
taken for granted. UNC and NC State biomedical engineers are using a new
virtual reality system that might one day be used to reveal balance
impairments currently undetectable during conventional testing or normal
walking.

Every year, falls lead to hospitalization or death for hundreds of thousands
of elderly Americans. Standard clinical techniques generally cannot diagnose
balance impairments before they lead to falls. But researchers from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State
University have found evidence that virtual reality (VR) could be a big help
- not only for detecting balance impairments early, but perhaps also for
reversing those impairments and preventing falls.

In a study published in Nature Scientific Reports, a research team led by
Jason R. Franz, PhD, assistant professor in the Joint UNC/NC State department
of biomedical engineering, used a novel VR system to create the visual
illusion of a loss of balance as study participants walked on a treadmill. By
perturbing their sense of balance in this way and recording their movements,
Franz's team was able to determine how the participants' muscles responded.
In principle, a similar setup could be used in clinical settings to diagnose
balance impairments, or even to train people to improve their balance while
walking.

Young and healthy adults rely predominantly on the mechanical "sensors" in
their feet and legs to give them an accurate sense of body position. So,
healthy people usually have no trouble walking in the dark or with their eyes
closed. But this sense of proprioception declines in the elderly, as well as
in people who have neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis,
leading to a much greater reliance on visual cues to maintain balance.

Read the entire article at:
https://www.mdtmag.com/news/2017/04/can-virtual-reality-help-us-prevent-falls-elderly-and-others
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2017/04/can-virtual-reality-help-us-prevent-falls-elderly-and-others

Links:
Jason R. Franz
https://www.engr.ncsu.edu/faculty-staff/new-faculty/2015/franz2015.php

The Neuromuscular Origins of Kinematic Variability during Perturbed Walking
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-00942-x