ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biomechanics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1589072
Quantification of changes in balance control with tasks and injury using detrending methods for time series analysis
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institute for Medical Research, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
- 2Faculty of Sport and Physical Education, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Human balance control is regulated by complex temporal processes that may be disrupted by injury or increased task difficulty. We examined long-range temporal characteristics of force platform recordings during quiet standing in 76 physically active participants with or without lower-limb injury, and in 13 non-injured participants standing with eyes closed or on one leg. Using detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and wavelet transform spectral analysis (WTS), we quantified the temporal dynamics of postural control. We observed long-range autocorrelated behavior in all recordings, with a visible crossover point separating random fluctuations at small time scales from non-linear, structured dynamics at higher time scales (100 ms to 1 s). Changes in scaling behavior were observed only above the crossover point in response to altered stance conditions or injury. Specifically, standing on one leg increased DFA and WTS slopes, likely due to enhanced amplitudes of characteristic peaks at approximately 250 ms and 650 ms. Two distinct postural responses to injury emerged: (1) compensation, characterized by increased amplitudes of all high-scale WTS modes and a shift of the crossover to smaller scales, and (2) underachievement, marked by decreased amplitudes and a shift of the crossover to larger time scales. These findings support the potential of DFA, WTS, and similar time series techniques as sensitive tools for assessing subtle impairments in postural control.
Keywords: Postural Balance, Lower extremity injuries, time series analysis, Signal processing, scaling analyses
Received: 07 Mar 2025; Accepted: 12 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Radic, Blesic, Anicic, Milanovic, Mirkov and Knežević. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Iva Radic, Institute for Medical Research, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.