Design and Testing of an Active Balancing Board for Exergames

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of balance and coordination in maintaining overall health, particularly among the elderly population. As societies around the world experience demographic shifts with an increasing number of elderly individuals, age-related declines in balance and coordination can lead to an elevated risk of falls and fall-related injuries, making it a significant public health concern. The need for effective balance rehabilitation and fall prevention strategies has become paramount. This paper presents a motion platform designed for balance rehabilitation exercises using exergames. The system consists of a 3 degrees of freedom (3DOF) platform actuated by four servomotors controlled by Omron-DeltaTau real-time motion controller. As a novelty with respect to other State of Art (SoA) actuated platforms, in the present work the movements of the user's body, which determine the platform motion, are tracked by exploiting a markerless motion capture system with an RGB camera and pose-estimation algorithm MediaPipe. The human displacement is used to generate the input for the roll rotation of the platform according to a one d.o.f. transfer function, whose parameters can be set to get different levels of difficulties in the exercise. The device offers therefore the flexibility to set different parameters to modify the level of the users’ training. The proposed device has the potential for a larger variety of rehabilitation activities and exergames. This paper describes the elements adopted for the implementation of this human-in-the-loop system, presents some preliminary tests to explore the influence of transfer function parameters on human and platform movements, and concludes with future development possibilities.