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.