Article

Falls represent a heavy economic and clinical burden on society. The identification of individual chronic characteristics associated with falling is
of fundamental importance for the clinicians; in particular, the stability of
daily motor tasks is one of the main factors that the clinicians look for during
assessment procedures. Various methods for the assessment of stability in human
movement are present in literature, and methods coming from stability analysis of
nonlinear dynamic systems applied to biomechanics recently showed promise. One of
these techniques is orbital stability analysis via Floquet multipliers. This
method allows to measure orbital stability of periodic nonlinear dynamic systems
and it seems a promising approach for the definition of a reliable motor
stability index, taking into account for the whole task cycle dynamics. Despite
the premises, its use in the assessment of fall risk has been deemed
controversial. The aim of this systematic review was therefore to provide a
critical evaluation of the literature on the topic of applications of orbital
stability analysis in biomechanics, with particular focus to methodologic
aspects. Four electronic databases have been searched for articles relative to
the topic; 23 articles were selected for review. Quality of the studies present
in literature has been assessed with a customised quality assessment tool.
Overall quality of the literature in the field was found to be high. The most
critical aspect was found to be the lack of uniformity in the implementation of
the analysis to biomechanical time series, particularly in the choice of state
space and number of cycles to include in the analysis.
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Langue : ANGLAIS