Abstract
The vestibular system detects rotational velocity and linear acceleration of the head in order to identify body’s spatial orientation. Impairments of these organs induce the subject to spatial disorientation, postural instability, self-motion perception deficits, and chronic disequilibrium. Gaze stabilization performances are usually evaluated by the assessment of the Visual Acuity during head movements. This work introduces a new testing device, named Up-Down Chair (UDC), able to generate full body linear accelerations in the vertical direction. These stimuli can be tuned to mimic those encountered during natural activities. This platform has been designed to serve as an experimental set up to quantify vestibular functions and their relationship to clinical scales. Moreover, the UDC could be used to assess specific testing performance for a vestibular neuroprosthesis.
We acknowledge financial support from the European Commission 7th FP (GA 225929) Project CLONS CLOsed-loop Neural prostheses for vestibular disorders.
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Bassi Luciani, L., Genovese, V., Monaco, V., Micera, S. (2013). A Novel Assessment Device to Quantify Vestibular Function. In: Pons, J., Torricelli, D., Pajaro, M. (eds) Converging Clinical and Engineering Research on Neurorehabilitation. Biosystems & Biorobotics, vol 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34546-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34546-3_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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