Development and Validation of an Experimental Protocol to Evaluate Posture Control.

Maintaining a stable upright position and body orientation are fundamental tasks to perform everyday activities and ensure the quality of life. The ability to maintain these can be damaged by various pathologies/disfunctions, such as stroke and aging. Therefore, it is important to quantify how the postural control reacts to different situation and how is affected by different pathologies, which could bring a big contribution in a clinical context, by helping to diagnose pathologies that can bring postural impairments. An experimental protocol was developed that combines both electromyography and posturography. To help validate this protocol, 53 patients (43 healthy and 10 stroke patients) performed it twice within a two-week period. By comparing the results from the two runs, it was possible to assess that these were not statistical different, and thus prove that the protocol is viable tool to build a normative database.