Natural sensory feedback for control of standing

The use of natural sensory signals as feedback for FES systems within rehabilitation is still in its early stage. So far the signals have mostly been used for event detection, e.g, detection of slip. A new application of sensory feedback signals is to apply it in control of paraplegic standing, This paper describes a preliminary study to the use of natural sensory feedback in control of FES assisted standing. It was investigated whether it seems possible to extract a qualitative feature suitable for control of standing from an ENG signal recorded by a cuff electrode. The ENG from the foot sole of one normal subject, standing with voluntary sway, was modeled and used for extraction of the center of pressure (COP) within the foot support area. An artificial neural network was used for feature extraction and the extracted COP was compared with the actual COP measured by a forceplate. The result showed that the modeled ENG signal does provide information about the position of COP.