For my final project in Biomechanics, Alejandro Crawford and I built a really fun game to train and test balance called Cowabunga 2000. We built a balance board out of foam and wood, with a Wiimote strapped to the bottom.
We sent the Wii data to MaxMSP through Darwiin Remote, which uses OSC to get the gyroscope and accelerometer readings into Max. We graphed those on the screen over old surf videos and music, with prompts to do different destabilizing things on each level. Reading about balance, I found that a common test for people with neurologically or chemically compromised balance and proprioception is the Romberg Test . This asks subjects to close their eyes to isolate their inner ear as balance source, cross their arms over their chest to change their center of gravity, and reach their arms out to either side, to judge the limits of their balance. We added these to add difficulty to our game, while not making it impossible to win. A video demo is below.
