Human Balance Strategies during Long-term Disturbance

Abstract

The key for humans to maintain balance in complex environment is the ability to choose an appropriate balance strategy adaptively. To better understand the mechanism of balance recovery strategy selection, we aim to study the relation-ships between perturbation dependent response foot state and balance recovery strategy for velocity-controlled perturbations of different durations. Foot kinetic and kinematic data were measured simultaneously for distinguishing different state and strategy and find the thresholds under 10 compliant treadmill-controlled perturbations. Each condition was repeated for 10 times to find the relationships between heel-lifting frequency and stepping strategy. All experiment perturbation magnitudes were conducted randomly. The result shows that foot pressure distribution can easily identify heel-lifting foot state and step-ping strategy. The frequencies of HL of were always larger than SS frequencies and the boundary of HL is smaller than SS. Also, the rate of change for achieving heel lifting in ground re-action force distribution may indicate balance ability. This study reveals the influence of the change of human balance strategy on plantar pressure. In turn, that relationship can be used for human balance strategy identification, which could help control humanoid robot.