杏吧原创

WHEN Ross Clark read in New 杏吧原创 (29 March 2008, p 26) that the US military considered the Nintendo Wiimote controller accurate enough to control bomb disposal robots, it set him thinking. Could the Wii鈥檚 skiing and snowboarding attachment, the balance board, help rehabilitate people who have had a stroke?

鈥淚 wanted to know if it would be any good for assessing the standing balance of patients,鈥� says Clark. He reasoned that being able to measure the centre of pressure of a person鈥檚 foot will be useful to a physio who is helping someone relearn how to stand. Yet the lab-grade 鈥渇orce platforms鈥� needed to do that cost more than 拢11,000 鈥� putting them out of the reach of many physio clinics.

鈥淚 wanted to know if the balance board would be good for assessing balance in stroke patients鈥�

So Clark and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Australia, took apart a Wii balance board and hacked into its strain gauges and accelerometers to tap into their raw data. 鈥淲e found the data to be excellent. I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up.鈥�

Now, in a paper published in the journal Gait and Posture (), Clark鈥檚 team has verified that the board鈥檚 data is clinically comparable to that of a force platform. 鈥淭he low price of the Wii kit is now seeing it used to assess rehabilitation after stroke, traumatic brain injuries and to examine standing balance in children who were born pre-term,鈥� he says.