Design and development of a novel balancer with variable difficulty for training and evaluation

TLDR: This paper proposed a novel, portable and cost-effective balance trainer with all necessary important features to improve the reach of rehabilitation to the masses, incorporating only the most important and frequently used functions.

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel, portable and cost-effective balance trainer with all necessary important features to improve the reach of rehabilitation to the masses. There are three factors that contribute to a person's ability to maintain standing balance---proprioceptive feedback (from the joints), vision, and the vestibular system. These systems can be affected by injury, infection, or brain damage caused by stroke. One example of such injuries is ankle injury. A large focus of the physiotherapy and sports medicine community is using postural-control tasks to prevent, assess and rehabilitate patients.Unfortunately, there are presently two extreme ends of balance training devices. On one end there are the high-end equipments which only large hospitals are capable of buying. On the other end are the simple balance boards which offer very limited features.Thus, the authors proposed a novel, portable and cost-effective balance trainer with most of the necessary important features to improve the reach of rehabilitation to the masses. The device has a small footprint, incorporating only the most important and frequently used functions. These functions include being able to provide different levels of difficulty, setting different difficulty in different directions, storing of patients' performance, real-time visual feedback to aid the patients and different types of modes for different purposes. Springs are used to vary the moments, which will actually vary the difficulty levels. This is due to the fact that balancing is actually about keeping the equilibrium moments to be zero.