OMBA - On the Move Balance Assessment

Balance disorders have a large negative impact on quality of life. Several methods have been developed that can help patients stay balanced, however these systems at present remain tethered to a gait lab or to a balance platform. A real time system that calculates the center of pressure and extrapolates the patient"s motions to determine stability during ambulation would enable these systems to become ambulatory devices that a patient can use at all times, dramatically increasing their usefulness to the patient population and opening new avenues for more intense training that may yield better results faster. The On-the-Move Balance Assessment (OMBA) system is designed to meet the noted needs. OMBA uses two different algorithms to robustly calculate whether the user is in danger of falling, providing predictive information in time for corrective action. OMBA is designed to be comfortable to wear and easy to use, with extremely low rate of false positives and no false negative alerts. Our team is well positioned to develop OMBA within the SBIR framework. We present a Phase I proposal aimed to address the novel aspects of the system, so that a complete system can be fabricated and tested in Phase II.