· The entropy of Center of Pressure sway can reveal the risk of falling

· Older adults at high risk of falling present more entropic body oscillations, as reflected by CoP sway

· Young subjects and senior adult at lower risk of falling have a much more entropic sway of

Human balance is the result of a dynamic equilibrium. Dynamic, in opposition to static, means that we stand in a vertical position, because we keep balancing opposite forces. If we move our chest forward, with the toes we push on the floor, to bring our chest back avoiding falling. So our standing is not static, but we sway around an ideal centre positioned between our feet. This all happen autonomously, without us paying attention to our postural control.

However, our capability to control posture and balance changes along life. This change can be measured to identify critical variations, which may reveal a higher risk of falling in later life. Accurate detection of these changes can be used to better target interventions aiming to mitigate the risk of falling.

“Well, if it is as easy as it sounds, why this was not done before? In my opinion, the answer is that we were looking in the wrong direction. Previous studies investigated changes in our balance control using measures of order (e.g., stats, periodicity), while we have been looking into the non-linear behaviour of body sway, measuring its entropy. Order change with age, but entropy chance catastrophically in older citizen at higher risk of falling”.

The study recently published by Luis Montesinos and Rossana Castaldo from the applied biomedical signal processing and intelligent eHealth Lab directed by Leandro Pecchia, demonstrated that it is possible to reveal the differences in body sway between older adults and older adult at a higher risk of falling, as determined from their clinical history. These findings represent a significant contribution to the development of improved fall-risk assessment tools in geriatric populations.

L. Montesinos: “With this study, we were not aiming to create new methods for signal analysis. Instead, we were interested in learning how existing methods can be used to identify and understand differences in balance control between older adults at lower and higher risk of falling. In the same way a radio needs to be tuned to pick the station of our choice, the methods we applied require some ‘fine-tuning’ in order to pick differences in body sway between different populations. Our study provided us with interesting insights in this respect, which we want to share with researchers and clinicians in our scientific community and beyond.”

The results of the study were recently published in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, the leading academic publication in its subject area of rehabilitation medicine according to Scopus. The article can be accessed here: https://rdcu.be/bdihg