Proposal of a stance postural control model with vestibular and proprioceptive somatosensory sensory input

Abstract

Maintenance of upright stance is one of the basic requirements in human daily life. Stance postural control is achieved based on multisensory inputs such as visual, vestibular and proprioceptive somatosensory inputs. In this paper, we proposed a stance postural control model including a neural controller with feed-forward inputs (muscle stiffness regulation) and sensory feedback of vestibular and proprioceptive somatosensory sensation. Through the optimization, variables of neural controller were designed to keep a musculoskeletal model standing during a 5 s forward dynamics simulation. From the results, we found that when both vestibular and proprioceptive somatosensory sensory input are available, low muscle stiffness is enough to maintain the balance of a musculoskeletal model in a stance posture. However, when vestibular sensory input get lost, higher muscle stiffness will be desired to keep the musculoskeletal model standing.