Identification of Postural Controllers in Human Standing Balance

Standing balance is a simple motion task for healthy humans but the actions of the central nervous system (CNS) have not been described by generalized and sufficiently sophisticated control laws. While system identification approaches have been used to extracted models of the CNS, they either focus on short balance motions, leading to task-specific control laws, or assume that the standing balance system is linear. To obtain comprehensive control laws for human standing balance, complex balance motions, long duration tests, and nonlinear controller models are all needed. In this paper, we demonstrate that trajectory optimization with the direct collocation method can achieve these goals to identify complex CNS models for the human standing balance task. We first examined this identification method using synthetic motion data and showed that correct control parameters can be extracted. Then, six types of controllers, from simple linear to complex nonlinear, were identified from 100 s of motion data from randomly perturbed standing. Results showed that multiple time-delay paths and nonlinear properties are both needed in order to fully explain human feedback control of standing balance.