Reliability and validity of balance tasks performed by healthy adults on a Wii Balance Board compared to a laboratory grade platform

The Wii Balance Board is originally designed for commercial purposes by Nintendo. However, its portability, cost and connectivity made it a promising piece of equipment for clinical and research purposes. Through its four sensors, it is able to detect vertical forces applied to the board and to record shift of weight on the board. Therefore, it is suitable to be used as a force platform to measure center of pressure. It is known that the Wii Balance Boards suffer from time-jitter and may therefore be not as accurate as laboratory grade force platforms, such as a Kistler force platform, to measure center of pressure during balance tasks. The aim of this study is to evaluate the clinimetric properties (i.e. test-retest reliability and criterion validity) of the Wii Balance Board compared to a Kistler platform in healthy adults performing a single leg and quiet standing still balance task. Also, it remains difficult to use the Wii Balance Board in clinical practice, due to limitations introduced by difficult software and time consuming analysis procedures. Through this study we developed a online tool that may help to overcome such limitations. 

The app and code are hosted at this github page: https://github.com/tomvredeveld/center-of-pressure-analysis-tool for easier sharing of code, pull requests, branches and other features Git provides.

This FigShare project page contains scripts to reproduce this study.

This FigShare project page contains script items that provide building blocks to reproduce our analysis, tinker with the analysis of concurrent validity and create your own analysis. Although all scripts are provided with annotations, it might be that some remains unclear. Please, feel free to contact us.