Indexing Behavioral Decrements by Computerized Assessment of Stance

平衡的感觉器官允许一个人保持直立的姿势，并将物体定位在图像清晰度最好的中央视野中。 长期以来，医生们一直使用站立姿势和步态作为损伤和疾病的指标;同样，药物和酒精也会在其他健康的个体中产生平衡障碍。 因此，稳定性的变化在临床和研究环境中都作为中枢神经系统功能的总体指标。 尽管存在一些临床电池，但这些电池往往是昂贵的并且需要笨重的固定设备。在实验工作中，还没有一种便携式、自动评分和负担得起的方法来测量姿势稳定性。 在这项工作的第一阶段，我们假设，头部位置的措施单独可以充分代表整体的稳定性，设计和建造了一个原型设备使用新的视频记录和图像捕捉技术，并开发了软件，从视频记录的头部运动的自动分析。 评估了16个姿势测量，并根据测量特性选择了一个用于进一步使用。 使用原型，我们分析了头部运动，并获得了三个关键结果：a）一个单一的主题的头部运动显示出完美的协议与组的结果在一个不太复杂的“时间下降”的措施，表明该方法是有用的个人测量; B）更多和更大的头部运动被发现与酒精剂量的增加;和c）两名飞行员在使用飞行模拟器后显示姿势稳定性显著下降。 本研究的潜在商业应用可以使用与日常生活中的表现相关的中枢神经功能的一般测量，a）作为工作场所的适合度指数; B）测量与新开发的虚拟现实系统相关的越来越多的报道的后遗症; c）指示疾病、药物治疗或药物使用的时间过程变化;和d）评估老年人、体弱者或其他临床人群的姿势稳定性。

The sensory organs of balance permit a person to maintain upright posture and to position objects in the central field of vision where image clarity is best. Physicians have long used stance and gait as pointers to damage and disease; likewise drugs and alcohol will produce balance disturbances in otherwise healthy individuals. Changes in steadiness have thus served in both clinical and research settings as an overall index of central nervous system functioning. Although some clinical batteries exist, these tend to be expensive and require cumbersome, fixed apparatuses. There has not been a portable, automatically scored, and affordable way to measure postural stability in experimental work. In Phase I of this effort, we hypothesized that measures of head position alone could adequately represent overall steadiness, designed and built a prototype device using new video recording and image capturing technology, and developed software for automated analysis of head movements from video records. Sixteen postural measures were evaluated, and one was selected for further use based on measurement properties. Using the prototype, we analyzed head movements and obtained three key results: a) Head movements for a single subject showed perfect agreement with group results on a less sophisticated "time to fall" measure, showing that the approach was useful for individual measurement; b) more and larger head movements were found with increasing doses of alcohol; and c) two aviators showed significant decreases in postural steadiness after using a flight simulator. POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCH A general measure of central nervous function which can be connected to performance in everyday life could be used, a) as a fitness-for-duty index in the workplace; b) to measure aftereffects which are increasingly being reported in connection with the newly developing virtual reality systems; c) to index time-course change of disease, drug therapy, or drug usage; and d) to assess postura l stability in the elderly, infirm, or other clinical populations.