Designing and Manufacturing of Instrumented Wobble Board and Investigating the Reliability of its Extracted Parameters

Postural control is an important component of examination and treatment in the rehabilitation sciences. The primary and main purpose of this study was to manufacture of Instrumented Wobble Board (IWB) as an inexpensive means for evaluating dynamic balance control. The secondary purpose of the study was to estimate the reliability of its extracted parameters. Subject and IWB includes a wobble board that placed on the frame with 8 microswitches in the 8 directions of movement. Output circuit connected to microswitches was read by DAQ card. Extracted parameters includes: contact frequency، recovery time in any direction، mean recovery time، number of contact، and total recovery time. In order to assess reliability، ten healthy subjects participated in two separated sessions with a time interval of 48 h between two sessions. Test conditions included single postural task (standing on the dominant leg with straight and bent knee) and dual cognitive task. ICC2،3 was used to express reliability. Generally the results showed good to high level of reliability for contact frequency and moderate to good level of reliability for recovery time. According to these results، in comparison with the expensive device of Biodex Balance System، IWB is an inexpensive device with reasonable measurement accuracy for evaluating dynamic balance control in the research setting as well as physiotherapy clinics.