How Do We Maintain Our Balance?
Prototype shoes produced by some research organizations prevent us from falling by making some movements that will keep us balanced in a possible obstacle.
I recently wrote that scientists are working on the clothing of the future.
In that article, I mentioned that experiments were being carried out to show that it would be possible to walk with much less energy with a prototype boot-type shoe produced for this purpose, and that there may be new types of shoes that stimulate our muscles with electrical signals to make our muscles spend much less energy while walking.
As far as I understand, scientists have really focused on this shoe issue and now they have produced new types of shoes that will help us balance faster.
What can I say, scientists in other countries are not idle like ours, they are always working on something, always finding something.
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As you probably know, we maintain our balance when the signals coming from the balance sensors in our inner ears reach the balance center in our cerebellum, and after the evaluation made there, the necessary commands are transmitted to our feet and body muscles with our nerve endings.
Of course, when we talk about balance, we cannot ignore our eyes and the deep sensory system located in different parts of our body, but when we talk about balance, the sensors in our inner ears stand out as the main system.
Communication between all these organs takes at least 130 ms.
In a sense, this is the same duration as our auditory reflex.
In fact, our visual reflex duration is longer than this, around 180-220 ms. So while our balance reflex is similar to our auditory reflex, it is faster than our visual reflex.
However, in some cases even this short time is not enough.
Therefore, in many cases, we lose our balance and fall because of an obstacle that suddenly appears in front of us.
Moreover, in such situations, we often sprain our ankle.
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Nowadays, scientists are working on shoes that will give reflexes much faster than the 130 milliseconds our brains need for balance
The prototype shoes produced in these studies aim to prevent us from falling by making some movements that will keep us in balance in a possible obstacle.
It is thought that these shoes will be especially useful for people who have had an accident and have difficulty walking and for people who have aged.
Maybe we will have really different clothes in the future, it seems to me that the future will show interesting developments in this regard.
Stay with science, you can't go wrong!
Love and respect to everyone from Moscow.
