A Wearable Balance Exercise Device, Powered by Compressed Gas, Could Help Reduce Patients' Fall Risk

Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science, Hiroshima University, the Prefectural University of Hiroshima, and Fukuyama Memorial Hospital have come up with a wearable device to help patients improve their balance at home: the Wearable Balance Exercise Device (WBED).

"We designed WBED to be lightweight, portable, and easy to use both at home and in clinical settings. It weighs only 0.9kg [under 2lbs] and takes less than three minutes to put on," Masataka Yamamoto, assistant professor at the Tokyo University of Science and first author on the paper detailing the device.

"Our results prove that perturbation-based balance exercises using WBED immediately improve the subjects' reactive postural control. Wearable exercise devices, such as the proposed WBED, could contribute to the prevention of falls and fall-related injuries."

The WBED takes the form of two pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) arranged like shoulder straps, with electronically-controlled valves inflating or deflating the muscles from a can of compressed gas using a DhaibaDAQ control board. By rapidly inflating the muscle on one side under control of a smartphone program, the wearer is pulled sideways — and inflating the other side pulls them the other way.

With the ability to effectively pull the patient remotely, the researchers set about seeing if the wearable could help patients with at-home balance exercises. Testing on a cohort of 18 health adult males, split into the WBED group and a group which carried out the same exercises without the wearable, the team found that those wearing the device showed lower displacement and peak velocity post-exercise than the team without — suggesting it does, indeed, have an impact.

"For fall prevention and the extension of a healthy livelihood," the researchers conclude, "it is important to be able to perform perturbation-based balance exercises anywhere without instruments or medical expert guidance. Balance exercise using this device may help to reduce falls in older adults."

The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine.