Citation

Castelli L, Stocchi L, Patrignani M, Sellitto G, Giuliani M, Prosperini L. J. Neurol. Sci. 2015; 359(1-2): 440-444.

Affiliation

Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. Electronic address: luca.prosperini@uniroma1.it.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jns.2015.10.016

PMID

26490321

Abstract

This study was aimed at investigating whether postural sway measures derived from a standard force platform were similar to those generated by a custom-written software ("We-Measure") acquiring and processing data from a commercial Nintendo balance board (BB). For this purpose, 90 patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and 50 healthy controls (HC) were tested in a single-day session with a reference standard force platform and a BB-based system. Despite its acceptable between-device agreement (tested by visual evaluation of Bland-Altman plot), the low-cost BB-based system tended to overestimate postural sway when compared to the reference standard force platform in both MS and HC groups (on average +30% and +54%, respectively). Between-device reliability was just adequate (MS: 66%, HC: 47%), while test-retest reliability was excellent (MS: 84%, HC: 88%). Concurrent validity evaluation showed similar performance between the reference standard force platform and the BB-based system in discriminating fallers and non-fallers among patients with MS. All these findings may encourage the use of this balance board-based new device in longitudinal study, rather than in cross-sectional design, thus providing a potential useful tool for multicenter settings.

Language: en