Abstract
Upright posture control and gait are essential for achieving autonomous daily living activities. Postural control of upright posture relies, among others, on the integration of various sensory information. In this context, light touch (LT) and light grip (LG) of a stationary object provide an additional haptic sensory input that helps to reduce postural sway. When LG was studied through the grasp of a cane, the sensory role of this assistive tool was often limited to a mediation interface. Its role was restricted to transmit the interaction forces between its tip and the ground to the hand. While most studies involve participants standing in an unstable way, such as the tandem stance, in this paper we study LG from a different perspective. We attached a handle of a cane firmly to a stationary support. Thus, we can focus on the role of the hand receptors in the LG mechanism. LG condition was ensured through the tactile information gathered by FSR sensors placed on the handle surface. Moreover, participants involved in our study stood in a usual way. The study involved twelve participants in an experiment composed of two conditions: standing relaxed while lightly gripping an equipped handle attached to the ground, and standing in the same way without gripping the handle. Spatial and frequency analyses confirmed the results reported in the literature with other approaches.
Highlights
We show the results of the experiment, covering the forces applied on the handle, the analysis of the area of sway, the correlation between the forces applied to the handle and the center of pressure (CoP), and the frequency analysis
The instructions of lightly gripping the handle were observed by participants (Figure 6 helps visualize the directions of the captured forces and moments)
They are in accordance with the results reported in [11] and could indicate a long neural loop activated by sensory information
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The authors reported that touch and force use of the cane reduced the center of pressure (CoP) displacement equivalently compared to the control condition. The authors argued that the motion of the cane tip on the slippery ground resulted in less transmission of postural oscillations to the fingers. In [13], the authors studied the effect of light grip provided by a cane in order to compare it to the direct light touch by a fingertip. In other words, they tried to examine the efficiency of using a cane as a mediation of the haptic cues evoked by body oscillations.
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