Low-cost, portable balance training and assessment platform

Having good balance means being able to control and maintain your body's position. Good balance helps you walk without staggering, get up from a chair without falling, climb stairs without tripping, and bend over without falling. Good balance is important to help you get around, stay independent, and carry out daily activities. Balance disorders are a common symptom of brain injuries as well as neurodegenerative disorders, and this affects the day to day lives of people suffering from these conditions. Physiotherapy clinics have access to expensive balance training and monitoring equipment, but there is a lack of inexpensive, portable balance training and measurement tools for patients' at-home use. Balance training programs exist, but the ability to both train and objectively measure performance is important to monitor improvement over time. This key gap requires a solution, and would improve the clinical care for patients with balance disorders.

Potential solutions for this project are highly feasible, and could be addressed with mobile technology using the inertial measurement units embedded within most modern smartphones. These could be integrated with low-cost wobble/balance boards. There are some balance assessment platforms, but these are not widely accessible to the general public for at-home use. This has the potential for major impact of at-home care and physiotherapy for patients with balance disorders.

This project needs a multidisciplinary team:

1. Engineers and data scientists to build the measurement platform and analysis algorithms.
2. Clinicians to ensure that the application incorporates best clinical practices for balance training/assessment.
3. Business to focus on the business case and product-market fit.

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