Identification of human balance control responses to visual inputs using virtual reality

Human upright balance is maintained through feedback mechanisms that use a variety of sensory modalities. Vision senses information about the position and velocity of the visual surround motion to improve balance by reducing the sway evoked by external disturbances. This study characterized the effects of visual information on human anterior-posterior body sway in upright stance by presenting perturbations through a virtual reality system. This made it possible to use a new visual perturbation signal, based on trapezoidal velocity pulses, whose amplitude and velocity could be controlled separately. To date, the influences of visual field position and velocity have only been studied independently due to the experimental limitations. The hip displacement, ankle torques, shank angles, and surface EMGs of four major ankle muscles were measured bilaterally as outputs. We found that the root mean square (RMS) hip displacement (body angle) increased systematically with visual input amplitude. However, for each amplitude, the RMS body angle increased when input velocity was changed from 2 to 5 degrees per second (dps) and then decreased from 5 to 10 dps. Spectral analysis was used to compute frequency response over a frequency range from 0.04 to 0.6 Hz. The gain of body sway relative to the perturbation increased with frequency, whereas the coherence declined. Moreover, as the stimulus amplitude increased, the gain generally decreased, whereas the mean coherence values always increased. The mean gains and mean coherence values were greatest for the velocity of 5 dps. This study presents a novel experimental approach to study human postural control and augments our knowledge of how visual information is processed in the central nervous system to maintain balance. NEW & NOTEWORTHY In this paper, we developed a new methodological approach to study the effects of visual information on dynamic body sway. We used VR to apply visual perturbations to induce AP body sway. We designed a new visual stimulus waveform based on trapezoidal velocity pulses whose peak-to-peak amplitude and velocity could be modulated independently. Subsequently, we investigated how the amplitude and velocity of visual field motion influence the postural responses evoked in healthy adults.