Elena Oggero

University of Wyoming | UW · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Objective Comparison of 2 mobile device measures of balance assessment using EQ and Sway balance systems. Design Method-comparison study. Setting Sports Medicine and Concussion Clinic. Participants 70 individuals (25 males and 45 females (mean age: 37.8 ± 14.8, range: 13–65) with and without concussion or other neurological conditions (39 concus...

The size of our pupils changes continuously in response to variations in ambient light levels, a process known as the pupillary light reflex (PLR). The PLR is not a simple reflex as its function is modulated by cognitive brain function and any long-term changes in brain function secondary to injury should cause a change in the parameters of the PLR...

The size of our pupils changes continuously in response to variations in ambient light levels, a process known as the pupillary light reflex (PLR). The PLR is not a simple reflex as its function is modulated by cognitive brain function and any long-term changes in brain function secondary to injury should cause a change in the parameters of the PLR...

Background: Prior concussion studies have shown that objective neurophysiological measures are sensitive to detecting concussive and subconcussive impairments in youth ice-hockey. These studies monitored brain vital signs at rink-side using a within-subjects design to demonstrate significant changes from pre-season baseline scans. However, practica...

Speech-language pathologists (SLP) play a pivotal role in determining service delivery methods for students with speech, language, communication, and literacy challenges. Often SLP providers work independently through individual or small- group treatment sessions. However, the contemporary collaborative whole language approach emphasizes evidence-b...

Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) is resultant from neurological injury and damage to visual pathways or vision centers in the brain. CVI is sometimes undiagnosed in individuals with brain injuries due to the complexity of the human visual system. The International Institute for the Brain (iBrain) is a specialized school for students ages 5 to 21 wh...

Post-Concussion Syndrome (PCS) is a relatively prevalent condition that emerges after sustaining a head injury. Individuals with PCS experience prolonged impairments and distress associated with the injury which can impact the individuals’ quality of life experiences. In this retrospective chart review of refractory adult patients diagnosed with PC...

In clinical practice, a comprehensive history and examination often includes questionnaires covering all systems. Physical examination is augmented by functional assessment using subjective (neck and lumbar disability indexes, NDI and LBDI respectively) and objective measures (computerized dynamic posturography, CDP). In this retrospective chart re...

Migraine is a common neurological disorder that is characterized by a host of symptoms including severe throbbing headaches. In this retrospective chart review, the effectiveness of Cortical Integrative Therapy (PedroCIT®) was examined in adults with migraines. Multivariate General Linear Model (M-GLM) was utilized to determine if the emotional, fu...

Central Sensitization (CS) is postulated as a central explanation of chronic pain. Clinical researchers recommend that therapists screen for CS to avoid diagnostic confusion and improve the allocation of appropriate clinical resources in primary care settings when managing chronic pain patients. However, the percentage of patients presenting with C...

In this retrospective study of adult patient’s charts from an outpatient clinical practice, three tools, Neck Disability Index (NDI), Numerical Pain Rating Scale (NPRS), and Computerized Dynamic Posturography (CDP), were investigated to evaluate how they are affected by demographics, anthropometry and clinical status, and if they are can detect the...

Primary care physicians see a very high incidence of vertigo, dizziness, and balance issues resultant from a broad spectrum of etiologies from vestibular dysfunction, brain injury, neck trauma, metabolic diseases to autonomic dysfunction and psychological conditions. Because dizziness is by definition a subjective condition, self-report questionnai...

Balance control systems involve complex systems directing muscle activity to prevent internal and external influences that destabilize posture, especially when body positions change. The computerized dynamic posturography stability score has been established to be the most repeatable posturographic measure using variations of the modified Clinical...

Introduction: Eye movement pathology can assist in the identification, diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders. Eye-tracking paradigms have been utilized to provide greater ecological validity, and directly capture the detailed sequence of processes in perception and attention, while quantifying classifiers in mood, anxiety, and psychot...

Introduction: Children affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have impairment of social interaction and demonstrate difficulty with emotional communication, display of posture and facial expression, with recognized relationships between postural control mechanisms and cognitive functions. Beside standard biomedical interventions and psych...

Context Approximately 1.8–3.6 million annual traumatic brain injuries occur in the United States. An evidence-based treatment for concussions that is reliable and effective has not been available. Objective The objective of this study is to test whether head–eye vestibular motion (HEVM) therapy is associated with decreased symptoms and increased f...

Eye movements such as saccades are utilized in therapeutic strategies in clinical settings within psychiatry, psychology, vestibular therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy and chiropractic. Attempts have been made to measure the relationship between saccades and postural stability within laboratory conditions. Conflicting information exist...

Military and police departments rely on their personnel’s ability to control a handgun for the safety of the citizens they are protecting, and recoil management is one aspect of safely controlling a handgun. This exploratory study used posturography as a method to quantify the effect of recoil from different guns and ammunition. More powerful calib...

There is an increased fall risk during pregnancy and many women actually fall with often serious and sometimes fatal consequences for the mother and/or the fetus. Biomechanical, physiological and hormonal changes all may play a part. Many studies have measured postural stability during pregnancy. However, further investigations are needed to examin...

A recent discovery revealed a therapeutic effect of external ear insufflation in the treatment of acute migraine headache. This finding led to the development of a treatment method and device for its delivery to human subjects. The challenges associated with developing an automated device, designed for unsupervised public use, included mitigation o...

The clinical use of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as a measure of a person’s health has been limited since data from comparable cohorts often yield inconsistent results. This study was designed to gain a better understanding of the stability and reproducibility of human HRV over a period of several months. We repetitively recorded the HRV of a singl...

Performance measures are used to identify sports-specific profiles in athletes. Combining positional play skill sets with tailored training routines allows coaches to maximize athletic potential of junior athletes while reducing risk of injury or developmental delay. Methodologies have included assessing a range of generic anthropometric and biomot...

Context Eye-movement training (EMT) can induce altered brain activation and change the functionality of saccades with changes of the brain in general. Objective To determine if EMT would result in changes in quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) and NIH Stroke Scale (NIHSS) in patients suffering from acute middle cerebral artery (MCA) infarctio...

When NASA started designing the space capsules for the lunar missions, they undertook extensive studies of the human body in terms of anthropometry and physiology. As part of these studies, the position of the Center of Mass was determined to be at 55.27% of the height of the subject. Considering the human body as an inverted pendulum, the theoreti...

Passive head motions are commonly used in vestibular rehabilitation to improve gaze stability. These motions are typically executed by a trained clinician who sinusoidally repeatedly rotates the patient's head in yaw (no-no) or pitch (yes-yes) by a prescribed amplitude and at a prescribed velocity. Recently, a robotic device called “Essential Vesti...

Introduction Treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in combat veterans that have a long-term positive clinical effect has the potential to modify the treatment of PTSD. This outcome may result in changed and saved lives of our service personnel and their families. In a previous before–after-intervention study, we demonstrated high stat...

Sound is known to affect the human brain, hence sound or music therapy is sometimes used to improve a subject's physicaland mental health. In this study, the effects sound stimulation has on balance were investigated by means of computerizeddynamic posturography tests performed with eyes closed on an unstable surface using a CAPS® system, exceeding...

Saccadic eye movements offer several insights into the functional status of many areas of the central nervous system. As suchtheir observation is an important component of any neurological assessment. Unfortunately, these types of eye movementsare very fast and therefore cannot be evaluated in detail without high speed instrumentation. Direct infra...

Each year, one in every three adults over the age of 65 falls often with injury. While this public health problem can be substantially reduced with simple interventions such as vestibular rehabilitation, balance assessments are not routinely done in the clinic, and less than half of affected adults talk to their physicians about such concerns. The...

Introduction: Blast-related head injuries are among the most prevalent injuries suffered by military personnel deployed in combat and mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) or concussion on the battlefield in Iraq/Afghanistan has resulted in its designation as a “signature injury.” Vestibular complaints are the most frequent sequelae of mTBI, and vesti...

Tai Chi for Arthritis (TCA) is recognized by the CDC as an evidenced-based program to prevent falls in older adults. Although seated Tai Chi is recommended for those unable to stand, little is known about balance control during seated TCA. To explore the use of posturography to assess differences between experts and non-expert practitioners of seat...

It is common practice in laboratories to check for accuracy, precision and resolution of instrumentation before using it inresearch. For force platforms used in gait analysis and balance measures, most of these verifications are done in staticconditions, i.e., applying known weights in known locations on the surface of the instrument, measuring wha...

When repeating tests on a subject it is important to know if changes of the results are significant. Researchers have used measures of reliability, e.g., Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) and Minimum Detectable Change (MDC), to assess reliability and validity of balance measures and equipment, and to determine what constitutes a Significant...

Although still considered experimental by some, computerized posturography is becoming more and more the standard assessment of balance and neuromuscular control mechanisms while standing. However, there is no consensus as to the data acquisition parameters to be used. Depending on which posturography school one belongs to, acquisition frequencies...

Tai Chi, performed either seating or standing, is frequently recommended to improve various aspects of health, including balance, metabolic control, heart rate variability, sleep, or immune response. Many studies exploring mind-body interventions, both with self-reported or biologically-measured outcomes, report significant differences in outcomes...

Background: Off vertical axis and multiplane whole body vestibular rotational therapy has received great attention by major network television and press subsequent to its utilization in the treatment of sports concussions and other traumatic brain injuries that result in neurological challenges to balance and gait. We desired to test the therapy in...

Currently the evaluation of the psycho-physical condition of individuals performing at-risk activities involves either subjective evaluations or invasive biological tests, and is not often indicative of the actual ability of the subject to perform the specific activity. We propose a new methodology based on posturographic and reaction time measurem...

Balance protocols such as the modified Clinical Test of Sensory Integration on Balance (mCTSIB) or the Balance Error Scoring System (BESS) include testing a person while standing on a thick foam cushion. The role of the foam cushion is to perturb the somatosensory and proprioceptive information and to provide an unstable and unpredictable standing...

Worldwide obesity is a major health concern because of its linkage to chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Obesity has also been linked to an increased incidence of falls. Fall injuries exceeded $16 billion in 2000. To reduce the impact on society and individuals, it is essential to explore mechanisms to reduce the f...

BACKGROUND: Many movement disorders and neurological syndromes are associated with pathology of balance and gait and there is a need to implement preventive and therapeutic measures and strategies to identify, assess, and target high-risk persons. METHODS: Twenty-five Participants underwent computer-controlled multi-axis chair rotation in combinati...

Biomedical sciences rely heavily on devices to acquire and analyze the physiological data needed to understand and model the biological processes of humans and animals. Therefore, the results of the investigations, clinical or academic, depend heavily on the instrumentation used. Unfortunately, all too often the users do not understand their instru...

Computerized posturography systems are commonly used to evaluate postural equilibrium and balance, usually performing a static balance test in which the person being tested tries to minimize the sway of the body. Most variations of static test are part of the modified Clinical Test of Sensor Integration in Balance (mCTSIB) test protocol. Given its...

One aim of this study was to find if there was a difference between balance and stability between elite level gymnasts and non-gymnasts. Another aim was to find if there was a relationship between dynamic posturographic scores associated with sway fatigue or adaptability and the ability to learn new gymnastic routines. The ultimate aim of the study...

The aim of this study was to ascertain whether listening to music might cause changes in human stability and be useful in fall prevention and rehabilitation. The aim was also to find what percentage of subjects without neurologic signs or symptoms associated with falling had less than ideal stability. Computer dynamic posturography (CDP) provided s...

There is no consensus as to the origins of the oscillations of the vertical ground reaction force during quiet stance. The concept of a cardiovascular origin is supported by many ballistocardiographic studies, but its exclusivity has never been proven. A new hypothesis was formulated to explain their genesis: there is a neuromuscular postural contr...

A one-dimensional lumped-parameters mathematical model of the standing human was developed to specifically investigate how the muscular activity and the cardiovascular forces originated by the heart movement and the blood ejection in the ascending aorta affect the ground reaction force in the head-to-toes direction. The forces produced by the cardi...

Designing a strain gage based force transducer is considered more of an art than an engineering process. Only general guidelines are available, and many trial and error iterations are needed to optimize the geometry and minimize the errors caused by nonlinear behavior of the structure. A new method, based on nonlinear finite element analysis and ro...

Studies conducted at the FAA Civil Aeromedical Institute have shown that when used in aircraft, automotive child restraint devices do not always provide the level of safety desired. Various factors that contribute to poor performance, such as seat belt anchor location, cushion stiffness, and child restraint device design features, were evaluated by...

A system for the measurement of forces in noninertial reference systems, and a possible solution to compensate force plate readings by means of accelerometers were investigated. If the force plate can be considered a rigid body, six linear accelerometers can measure all linear and angular accelerations of the instrument in 3-D space. However, by us...

Acquiring valid data is one of the major difficulties in gait analysis. Our previous study proved that, using the currently commercially available force plates, there is a low probability that every trial will be successful, and some subjects will have to alter their gait pattern to have a successful trial. In the present study the possibility of u...

Ballistocardiography is a non-invasive technique for the assessment of the cardiac function. It consists in studying the resultant forces generated by the blood mass flowing in the cardio-circulatory system while the subject lies on an instrumented bed. In the past, ballistocardiography was in large part limited by the signal processing and data ac...

To measure tremor characteristics independently on the testing protocol used (subject standing, sitting, or laying), a highly sensitive ballistocardiographic bed was built using strain gage technology. This resulted in an accurate, low cost, simple, lightweight and transportable instrument. Coupling this instrument with a high resolution data acqui...

Simulation is becoming an increasingly accepted method for training personnel for complex or high risk tasks. With the advent of modern Virtual Reality (VR) technology, such simulations are becoming more and more immersive. One significant limitation to the advance of this science is the challenges associated with simulating the touch or feel of va...

In an effort to investigate the mechanics of drop landing on a flat surface, bilateral performance characteristics during the landing were investigated. Two force plates were used as landing surfaces, and the six component kinetic time histories and the path of the center of pressure were measured for both feet. The forces were combined to obtain t...

The measurement technologies currently available to quantitatively evaluate neurological tremors have several limitations. For this reason the assessment of disorders involving tremor is largely based on subjective clinical evaluation of the patient. The availability of a high-sensitivity, portable and easy to use instrument based on force plate te...

The ability to capture analog signals in a digital format suitable for subsequent storage, processing and analysis by a computer has revolutionized many scientific fields, including biomechanics. In the process of going from the analog signal to its digital representation, it is essential to maintain as much of the original signal content as possib...

A major difficulty in using force plates for gait analysis is to have a foot fall completely on the instrument while not having the other foot in contact with the same device. This translates into more trials (and time) required to obtain valid data. In order to estimate the probability of a successful trial, which is related to the overall number...

The human locomotive apparatus is fascinating in its versatility, sophistication and performance. Its main characteristic is versatility. The locomotive apparatus appears to be optimized for an enormous variety of activities, not just for a few specific ones. While many animals can outperform humans in specific situations, none can perform as well...

The human locomotive system is probably the most sophisticated and complex locomotive apparatus that ever existed. In order to understand how the models of such system are built, it is useful to consider the meaning and implication of modeling and simulation as an attempt to represent reality. The human locomotive apparatus can be considered as con...