Nonlinear chaotic component extraction for postural stability analysis

Abstract : This paper proposes a nonlinear analysis of the human postural steadiness system. The analyzed signal is the displacement of the centre of pressure (COP) collected from a force plate used for measuring postural sway. Instead of analyzing the classical nonlinear parameters on the whole signal, the proposed method consists of analyzing the nonlinear dynamics of the intrinsic mode functions (IMF) of the COP signal. Based on the computation of the IMFs Lyapunov exponents, it is shown that pre-processing the COP signal with the empirical mode decomposition allows an efficient extraction of its chaotic component.