Effect of the vestibular system on search and fall behaviour of human postural sway

Date

2017

Author

Cengiz, Berat Can

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In a person's daily life, upright stance is a very essential postural position for using hands, locomotion, communication, etc. These motivations probably help a baby to solve this complex motor task faster. A healthy individual is thought to maintain his/her upright posture mainly by the help of four senses: vestibular, proprioception, vision, and somatosensory. With a classical view, human upright posture control mechanism is approached as a control system with multi inputs almost single output (CoPx). However, it is not only a classical mechanical control system with sensory inputs but also an actively acting system to drive perceptual information for exploring its environment. In this thesis, these active movements, with low-frequency characteristics, performed by healthy control subjects were named as a search (benign) behavior while the rapid corrections, with high-frequency characteristics, performed by bilateral vestibular loss (BVL) patients were named as a fall (malign) behavior. The contribution of the vestibular system to postural control was examined comparing the quiet stance CoPx signals of BVL and healthy subjects measured in different eye and surface conditions. Finally, results was discussed with an ecological perspective. 

Subject Keywords

Posture., Standing position., Vestibular apparatus., Equilibrium (Physiology)., Vestibular function tests.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12621298/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/26649

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis