Effects of Stroboscopic Goggles on Standing Balance in the Spatiotemporal and Frequency Domains: An Exploratory Study.

Balance training paradigms have been shown to effectively reduce fall risk. Visual feedback is an important sensory mechanism for regulating postural control, promoting visual perturbations for balance training paradigms. Stroboscopic goggles, which oscillate from transparent to opaque, are a form of visual perturbation, but their effect on standing balance has not been assessed. In this study, 29 participants stood in bilateral and tandem stances as the center of pressure was recorded for 6 consecutive minutes wherein there were no stroboscopic perturbations in the first and last minutes. Spatial-temporal, frequency domain, and nonlinear standing balance parameters were calculated for each period. More differences in spatial-temporal parameters due to the strobe were found in the medial-lateral direction than the anterior-posterior direction. More differences in frequency domain parameters were observed in the anterior-posterior direction than the medial-lateral direction, but this did not occur for each variable. The nonlinear parameters were strongly affected by the strobe. Stroboscopic perturbations did not affect the bilateral and tandem stances equally. Spatial-temporal parameters for the tandem stance were greater in magnitude during the strobe period than the no strobe periods. This effect was not seen with the bilateral stance. This indicates that the efficacy of stroboscopic perturbations for challenging standing balance depends on task difficulty. Balance training paradigms that utilize stroboscopic perturbations will need to harmonize these perturbations with task difficulty.