A New Training System Using a Tilting Bed for an Early Rehabilitation

We propose a new training system using a tilting bed, a visual display and a force plate for an early rehabilitation. Conventional rehabilitation systems for postural control have not been applicable to the patients who have to be lying in bed all the time. The rehabilitation training using those systems is only possible when the patient can stand up by himself or herself. Moreover, there did not exist any device that could provide the sense of balance or the sensation of walking to the patients in bed. The software for the system consists of the training part and the analysis part. The training part has been developed to provide various training scheme that help improve postural control ability of the subjects via repeated training of moving COP. The training consists of the COP maintaining training and the COP movement training in mediolateral, anterior-lateral, and posterior-lateral directions. The analysis part performs the assessments on the COP moving time, COP maintaining time, and mean absolute deviation before and after the training for different tilt angles of the bed. Through the experiments on number of subjects with the system, we tried to find the effectiveness of the advanced early rehabilitation training system. The results showed that this system is an effective system for early rehabilitation training and that our system can be used as clinical equipment.