Virtual reality in posturography

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information technology in biomedicine Vol. 10; no. 2; pp. 282 - 292
• Main Authors: Tossavainen, T., Toppila, E., Pyykko, I., Forsman, P.M., Juhola, M., Starck, J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.04.2006
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Cardiac disease; Cardiovascular diseases; Centralized control; Control systems; Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted - methods; Humans; Meniere Disease - diagnosis; Meniere Disease - physiopathology; Me´nie`re's disease; Muscles; Pattern Recognition, Automated - methods; Photic Stimulation - methods; Physical Stimulation - methods; Postural Balance; Posture; posturography; Reproducibility of Results; Retina; Senior citizens; Sensitivity and Specificity; Tendons; Testing; User-Computer Interface; Virtual reality; virtual reality (VR)
• ISSN: 1089-7771; 1558-0032
• DOI: 10.1109/TITB.2005.859874

Balance dysfunctions are common, especially among elderly people. Present methods for the diagnosis and evaluation of severity of dysfunction have limited value. We present a system that makes it easy to implement different visual and mechanical perturbations for clinical investigations of balance and visual-vestibular interaction. The system combines virtual reality visual stimulation with force platform posturography on a moving platform. We evaluate our construction's utility in a classification task between 33 healthy controls and 77 patients with Meacuteniegravere's disease, using a series of tests with different visual and mechanical stimuli. Responses of patients and controls differ significantly in parameters computed from stabilograms. We also show that the series of tests achieves a classification accuracy slightly over 80% between controls and patients