Designing and Manufacturing a Force plate Specified for Observing Balance Disabilities

One aspect that multiple sclerosis affects is the ability to balance properly. This may be momentary, or it may get more chronic, with a continued inability to maintain balance. In this paper, we design a force plate hardware and software of three-dimensional force measurement instrument based on strain gauge technology to detect and calculate balance characteristics. We take the advantageous of strain gauge sensors to measure the forces in three dimensions (x-axis, y-axis & z-axis) at 500Hz sampling rate and 6 grams sensitivity. The software will read the data through the USB port and save them in an excel file for further assessing. The software will also calculate the forces applied to the joints. Finally, the overall instrument is tested on several healthy subjects and their reports are altered elaborately. As far as the balance characteristics are important in analyzing and diagnosing various diseases (MS, Parkinson …), we extract changes in Centre of Pressure (COP) vector. This system may be used for analyzing and diagnosing balance disabilities and training the patients to improve their standing posture stability

کلیدواژه ها:

force plate ، balance disability ، diagnosis ، strain gauge ، center of pressure ، force ، moment