Validity of the Nintendo Wii Balance Board for the Assessment of Balance Measures in the Functional Reach Test

• Published in: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering Vol. 26; no. 7; pp. 1400 - 1406
• Main Authors: Mengarelli, Alessandro, Cardarelli, Stefano, Strazza, Annachiara, Di Nardo, Francesco, Fioretti, Sandro, Verdini, Federica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.07.2018
• Subjects: balance assessment; Calibration; center of pressure; Force; force plate; Functional reach test; Measurement uncertainty; nintendo wii balance board; Performance evaluation; Task analysis; Trajectory; Wrist
• ISSN: 1534-4320; 1558-0210; 1558-0210
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2018.2843884

The functional reach test (FRT) is widely used for assessing dynamic balance stability in elderly and pathological subjects. Force platforms (FPs) represent a fundamental part of the instrumented FRT experimental setup due to the central role of center-of-pressure (COP) displacement in FRT analysis. Recently, the nintendo wii balance board (NBB) has been suggested as a low-cost and reliable device for ground reaction force and COP measurement in poorly dynamic motor tasks. Therefore, this paper aimed to compare NBB-COP data with those obtained from a laboratory-grade platform during FRT. Data from 48 healthy subjects were simultaneously acquired from both devices. FP-COP and NBB-COP trajectories showed a remarkable correlation in both directions (r > 0.990) and low root-meansquare error values (1.14 ± 0.88 mm and 0.55 ± 0.28 mm for anterior-posterior and medial-lateral direction). Fixed biases between COP-based parameters did not exceed 2% of the FP outcomes with high consistency throughout the present measurement range (ICC consistency always >0.950). Only the COP mean velocity exhibited a tendency toward proportional errors, which can be adjusted by a calibration of NBB data. Findings of this paper confirmed the NBB validity for COP measurement in a widely used motor task as the functional reach, supporting the feasibility of NBB in research scenarios.