A sensing platform for postural behavior assessment

Postural instability is a symptom of disorders like ear diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes, psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson and one of the main causes of falls. The assessment of the patient’s postural stability through clinical maneuvers is performed at discrete times at more or less long intervals. A continuous monitoring of the patient’s postural stability while performing the daily activities would be of strategic interest for the doctors to gain continuous information on the user pathology or its progression. This paper introduces a wearable device designed to be used in the context of a multiuser multisensor wireless network and aimed at the continuous monitoring of the user’s postural sway.The paper mainly focuses on the architecture of the proposed solution and the methodology developed for the extraction of features, which enable the investigation on the user postural behavior. A first experimental assessment has been performed and results have demonstrated good performances of the developed signals processing.