Balance is the most neglected but the most important of all things in our lives. Standing, walking, holding something; everything requires balance. As you age, the perception of our balance goes a little askew, as we become stiffer and slower. We have more chances of losing our balance and falling. This phenomenon is intriguing, especially to Dagmar Sternad. He is a professor of biology and electrical-computer engineering at the Northeastern University.
On why there is a direct variation between age and balance is something still a mystery to Sternad. He says, it “is a bit of an unresolved puzzle”. Sternad has gathered ‘experts in balance’. What’s more! He is trying to study them to understand how it works in a human body. Ballet dancers were the ones she recruited for her little experiment. They are dancers from the Boston Ballet. Sternad will study them with the help of Marta Russo, a postdoctoral researcher.
The dancers who volunteered were Patrick Yocum and Lauren Herfindahl. As for their experiment, Sternad and Russo stuck some stickers on all their major joints. These are markers which will work as trackers of the dancers’ body movements. Then they put the dancers through a whole lot of challenges. They even told them to dance in the most unlikely of the scenarios.
“We want to learn the relation between support and balance,” said Russo. He even added that the results could have huge implications on people using canes to walk. Russo and Sternad are making use of pressure-sensitive pads on the ground. This will help them to measure the force exerted by the dancers during their movements. Along with this, around 12 cameras positioned in the room would record the way they move. It will help them to uncover the centers of mass. That’s the ever-shifting balance point a human body has when the weight is equally distributed everywhere. “Studying how the center of mass changes will help us immensely. It will let us understand how the body pulls itself back,” Russo said.
Sternad believes that this experiment will be the base of understanding human balance. “There are some limits of human performance when it comes to balance,” Sternad mused. “These dancers constitute a practical limit. This is, to clarify, foundational research.”
Pranjali Wakde