Examining Human Unipedal Quiet Stance: Characterizing Control through Jerk

We investigated the quality of smoothness during human unipedal quiet stance. Smoothness is quantified by the time rate of change of the accelerations, or jerks, associated with the motion of the foot and can be seen as an indicative of how controlled the balance process is. To become more acquainted with this as a quantity, we wanted to establish whether or not it can be modeled as a (stationary) stochastic process and, if so, explore its temporal scaling behavior. Specifically, our study focused on the jerk concerning the center-of-pressure (COP) for each foot. Data were collected via a force plate for individuals attempting to maintain upright posture using one leg (with eyes open). Positive tests for stochasticity allowed us to treat the time series as a stochastic process and, given this, we took the jerk to be proportional to the increment of the force realizations. Detrended fluctuation analysis was the primary tool used to explore the scaling behavior. Results suggest that both the medial-lateral and anterior-posterior components of the jerk display persistent and antipersistent correlations which can be modeled by fractional Gaussian noise over three different temporal scaling regions. Finally, we discussed certain possible implications of these features such as a jerk-based control over the force on the foot's COP.