Falls are the leading causes of unintentional injuries
in the elderly and thus a pose a major hazard to
our ageing society. We present the FOHEPO (FOot HEight
POsitioning) system to measure, diagnose and rehabilitate
ageing-related and neurological causes of falls. We hypothesise
that both perceptual and motor variability is likely to increase
with age and may lead to imprecise movements causing trip
overs, the major triggers of falls. Here we propose a robotic
system that automatically performs measures of fall-related
perceptual and motor variability in elderly subjects. Our
FOHEPO platform enables us to measure and track different
sources of noise in the nervous system: visual perception noise of
obstacle height, proprioceptive noise of localising raising one’s
foot to a desired height, noise in the visual feedback of the
foot movements. The platform should eventually provide us the
means to estimate fall probabilities by using these measures.
Crucially, we can use the same system in game-field settings to
rehabilitate elderly users moving with larger safety factors so
as to reduce their risks of trip-over.