TY - JOUR PY - 2021// TI - Postural sway characteristics are affected by Alzheimer's disease JO - Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. A1 - Ashiri, Mehrangiz A1 - Francisco, Cristina A1 - Winkler, Jeffrey A1 - Lithgow, Brian A1 - Moussavi, Zahra SP - 7219 EP - 7222 VL - 2021 IS - N2 - The vestibular system, responsible for balance, is affected by Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this paper, linear and non-linear balance features were used to assess the postural stability of 13 AD individuals at mild stages in comparison with 16 healthy controls. Utilizing two accelerometers, the anterior-posterior (AP) and medial-lateral (ML) sways were recorded from the T2 vertebrae and lateral malleolus of participants standing on a solid and soft foam surface under both eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions. From the recorded signals, four features were extracted and used for statistical analysis: Number of Position Changes (NPC), Number of Non-Zero Accelerations (NNZA), Katz, and Higuchi fractal dimensions (KFD and HFD, respectively). The results show: 1) postural stability is significantly worse for the eyes-closed compared to eyes-open condition (P<0.05 for all features except HFD) as well as whilst standing on soft foam compared to the solid surface (P<0.05 for all features) in both groups; 2) balance perturbations were larger for AP sway than ML on both solid and foam surfaces in both groups (P<0.05 for NPC and NNZA); and 3) stationary balance is significantly poorer for AD individuals compared to controls (P<0.05 for all features). These observations show that both linear and non-linear characteristics of postural stability data have the potentials to be used as objective diagnostic aids for the detection of AD.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 2375-7477 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630746 ID - ref1 ER -