Researchers begin to understand how animals maintain balance

[Jevin Scrivens (left) holds a robot used by Georgia Tech and Emory researchers to simulate balance control. Stacie Chvatal (middle) and Lena Ting (right) are setting up a human balance test. (Credit: Image courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology)]

Researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have gained a greater understanding of how the body maintains balance ... and regains its balance after losing some of its sensory capabilities ... by refocusing on how they attempted to study it. Instead of focusing on how each part of the body reacts to a change in balance and adjusts accordingly, they are studying how the nervous system reacts to control the muscles when the body's center of gravity changes horizontally.

They made a computer simulation that focused on a small set of sensory information that the body collects regarding its center of gravity, and were able to use it to accurately predict muscle reactions to changes in balance, based on the relation of the center of gravity to the ground. They found that subjects with impaired sensory information began to develop new pathways that enabled them (the subjects) to track their center of gravity and adjust accordingly ... close to what the simulation predicted as the optimum balance ... even though the muscle patterns appeared to be 'abnormal'.

In the future, this computer simulation could be used to determine what is impaired/where it is impaired in humans with balance impairment, and what the optimum recovery points are. Applying this method to robots, they were able to make the robots move in a fluid, animal-like manner, indicating that this is, indeed, closer to how living creatures maintain balance.

I think this is fascinating because the team 'simplified' their focus, and were able to make a major breakthrough in how we understand the body's balancing system. They used engineering principles and robots to understand how the body responds to balance disturbances, and now we can hopefully apply that to help people with injury or disease that disrupts the normal sensory pathways by which the body gathers balancing information.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070925160637.htm