University of Twente Student Theses
Testing different foot sole stimulation paradigms for experimental setup to study balance while standing still
Sanders, Danny (2023) Testing different foot sole stimulation paradigms for experimental setup to study balance while standing still.
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| Abstract: | As people become older their chance of falling becomes higher and they will suffer more heavily from a fall. The increased chance of falling is caused by a decrease in e.g. muscle strength, a change in the walking pattern and a reduction of the number of mechanoreceptors in the foot. Using certain stimulation paradigms on the sole of the foot might help prevent falls. This type of stimulation can be used to either increase the sensitivity of the mechanoreceptors in the foot sole or readjust the walking pattern of the subject, which can help prevent falls. Mechanical stimulation is currently used but due to issues with power and ease of use, alternatives are sought. One of these alternatives is electrical stimulation, but this type remains untested. To test this a setup is created consisting of a stimulation device (Digitimer DS5) an EMG measurement device (TMSi SAGA) and a GRF measurement device (Xsens Force Shoes), which are controlled by a control device (NI-USB 6211). With these devices a set of pretests and two experiments are performed. 9 Subjects participated in a set of experiments, where first the perceptual threshold (PT) of several regions of their foot sole was measured and then using these results two experiments were performed. In the first experiment, stochastic noise paradigms were tested, with the expectation that under certain noise bands the area of the postural sway would be minimized. In the second experiment the effect of electrical pulse stimulation on several regions of the foot sole was tested. The expectation is that every stimulation area, has a different effect on the direction of stimulation caused movement. In the first results, it seemed that the current paradigm of stochastic noise did not influence the postural sway, this part of the research needs to be re-evaluated and the paradigms need to be changed. In the second result a clear difference was shown in variability of the centre of pressure (CoP) in a subject. The variability of the CoP would be higher after the pulse for both the X and Y direction. The effect of stimulation was however not observed in every measurement and so optimization is still needed. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science |
| Programme: | Electrical Engineering MSc (60353) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/97083 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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