Development of an optomechanical measurement system for dynamic stability analysis

The paper presents the development of a measurement system for dynamic stability analysis. The system is composed of an actuation device, that is a robotic platform with four degrees of freedom, and two measurement systems: a force platform, to measure the position of the centre of pressure (COP), and a vision system, to measure the position of the centre of mass (COM). The purpose of the system is to provide means to identify whether a subject behaves like an inverted pendulum (as the literature predicts for static posturography), when a dynamic perturbation is applied. This can be achieved by generating a movement of the robotic platform and, simultaneously, by measuring COP and COM trajectories and verify their coherence with the inverse pendulum model.