Patient standing stability measurements using pressure sensitive floor sensors

Assessing a patient´s standing stability provides information to clinicians when monitoring a patient´s recovery after a stroke or hip surgery. This paper explores the usability of pressure sensitive floor sensors for capturing clinical information related to standing stability. The configurable parameters of the sensor array; sampling rate and resolution are varied to design a system that is efficient and effective in presenting data to clinicians. An algorithm using image processing techniques was developed to calculate the patient´s center of pressure (COP). The location of the COP is used to determine how symmetrical the patient´s stance is. While investigating the impact of reducing the sampling rate and resolution of the pressure sensor, a trade-off between bandwidth and accuracy was discovered. However the results show that the minimum sampling rate to obtain >;95% accuracy was 3.3 Hz and the minimal resolution to obtain >;90% accuracy used only ¼ of the sensor array.