A balance assessment and training protocol to address balance disorders in older and neurologically disabled adults.
Joseph Barton, John Sorkin
PMID 42293371WHAT IT FOUND
No results yet from the protocol described here.
Its precursor found that the worse someone's balance, the less accurately they tracked a moving target and the further they stayed from their balance limits. The training itself has not been tested against anything.
Key findings
01The protocol described in this paper has not been tested. The authors state what they expect from it, and report no outcomes from it.
02In the precursor test, tracking got harder for everyone as the target reached further: both tracking error and how far people moved within their base of support increased as the size of the target's movement increased, in all three groups.
03At the largest target size, healthy young adults used 51% of their base of support, older adults 29% and stroke survivors 17. These differences were statistically significant.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
There are no results from the protocol itself. Everything that was actually measured comes from the precursor test, which the authors say has been published before. The stroke group had only 15 people, and the paper does not say how severe the strokes were or how long ago they happened, so how far these numbers carry over to a typical stroke caseload is unknown. The task is done standing in front of a projection screen, so the protocol cannot assess or train movement forward and backward. A virtual reality version is planned but not built. The planned group size of 34 per group is justified by being able to tell the three groups apart, not by being able to detect a difference between the two training programmes. The paper does not describe how participants are assigned to the two training programmes, or whether anyone is kept unaware of which training a person received.
Declared interests
The authors declare that financial support was received for this work and its publication. The work is funded by a Department of Veterans Affairs VA Merit Award (project E3096-R, grant RX003096) and by a National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center award (project HP-00093539). No further individual disclosures are listed.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the numbers from the precursor test as evidence that this training works. The 51%, 29% and 17% figures describe how far three groups moved within their base of support before any training, and the protocol itself has not been tested yet.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →