ErgoTac-Belt: Anticipatory Vibrotactile Feedback to Lead Centre of Pressure during Walking

TL;DR

This study introduces the ErgoTac-Belt, a vibrotactile device that provides anticipatory feedback to guide the center of pressure during walking, aiming to improve balance control in healthy and impaired individuals.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel vibrotactile feedback system for guiding the center of pressure during walking, demonstrating its effectiveness comparable to visual feedback in healthy subjects.

Findings

The device successfully guided CoP along a predefined path.

Vibrotactile feedback performed similarly to visual feedback.

Potential for aiding balance in elderly or impaired individuals.

Abstract

Balance and gait disorders are the second leading cause of falls, which, along with consequent injuries, are reported as major public health problems all over the world. For patients who do not require mechanical support, vibrotactile feedback interfaces have proven to be a successful approach in restoring balance. Most of the existing strategies assess trunk or head tilt and velocity or plantar forces, and are limited to the analysis of stance. On the other hand, central to balance control is the need to maintain the body's centre of pressure (CoP) within feasible limits of the support polygon (SP), as in standing, or on track to a new SP, as in walking. Hence, this paper proposes an exploratory study to investigate whether vibrotactile feedback can be employed to lead human CoP during walking. The ErgoTac-Belt vibrotactile device is introduced to instruct the users about the direction to take, both in the antero-posterior and medio-lateral axes. An anticipatory strategy is adopted here, to give the users enough time to react to the stimuli. Experiments on ten healthy subjects demonstrated the promising capability of the proposed device to guide the users' CoP along a predefined reference path, with similar performance as the one achieved with visual feedback. Future developments will investigate our strategy and device in guiding the CoP of elderly or individuals with vestibular impairments, who may not be aware of or, able to figure out, a safe and ergonomic CoP path.