Extended Reality-based Proof-of-Concept to Clinical Assessment Balance and Postural Disorders for Personalized Innovative Protocol

Background Clinical assessment of balance and postural disorders is usually carried out through several common practices including tests such as Subjective Visual Vertical (SVV) and Limit of Stability (LOS). Nowadays several cutting-edge technologies have been proposed as supporting tools for stability evaluation. Extended Reality (XR) emerges as a powerful instrument; this study proposes a new XR embedded setup for an intuitive balance and postural assessment through a new concept of the SVV and LOS tests. The XR framework consists of the combination of the Mixed Reality-Head Mounted Display (MR-HMD) HoloLens 2 (HL2) (Microsoft), the Nintendo Wii Board for Center of Pressure (CoP) evaluation, and the Azure Kinect Technology for body-joints tracking. XR scenarios have been developed through Unity engine. The framework has been tested on a control group of fifteen healthy subjects. Results The data collected by the prototype allows to calculate new LOS parameters for the evaluation of head position, CoP and global posture. In SVV test the computed angular deviations from the vertical provided consistent results for the control group. Conclusion The analysis provided by such parameters allows to evaluate postural control in a holistic way, which could be useful in distinguishing between normal and pathological movement patterns in future research.