mBalance: detect postural imbalance with mobile devices

Conference item

Background:

Postural imbalance can be adopted for the early detection of age-related diseases or monitoring the course of the disease treatment; especially in monitoring, frequent balance measurement is crucial. This is mainly done through regular in-person examinations by a physician currently. Feedback in between examinations is often missing.

Objectives:

This paper proposes mBalance, a mobile application that uses the Romberg test to detect postural imbalance. mBalance provides a camera-based, low-cost approach to measure imbalance frequently at home using mobile devices.

Methods:

Imbalance detection accuracy and usability was evaluated in two separate studies with 31 and 30 participants, respectively.

Results:

mBalance correctly detected imbalance with a sensitivity of 80% and a specificity of 87%. The study found good usability with no significant problems.

Conclusion:

Overall, this study solves the problem of postural imbalance detection by digitizing a validated balance test into an easy-to-use mobile application.

Authors: Aldenhoven, CM; Reimer, LM; Jonas, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IOS Press
• Host title: Proceedings of the 16th Health Informatics Meets Digital Health Conference
• Pages: 30-38
• Series: Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
• Series number: 293
• Place of publication: Netherlands
• Publication date: 2022-05-16
• Acceptance date: 2022-04-08
• Event title: 16th Health Informatics Meets Digital Health Conference (dHealth 2022)
• Event location: Vienna, Austria
• Event website: https://dhealth.at/
• Event start date: 2022-05-24
• Event end date: 2022-05-25
• DOI: 10.3233/shti220344
• EISSN: 1879-8365
• ISSN: 0926-9630
• Pmid: 35592957
• EISBN: 9781643682839
• ISBN: 9781643682822
• Language: English
• Keywords: mHealth; mobile applications; augmented reality; telemedicine; postural balance