An Overview of Integrated Balance Rehabilitation (I-BAR) Framework

Neurological diseases impact around 1 billion people globally, with the numbers expected to increase due to population growth and aging, leading to a decline in lifestyle quality. The need of the hour is to develop a comprehensive methodology for ankle, balance, and step-taking rehabilitation for improving postural adjustment strategies (motor learning) in patients with different disease severity. To meet this need, we propose the Integrated Balance Rehabilitation (I-BAR) framework, designed to boost rehabilitation effectiveness through objective assessment, personalized therapy, and adaptability to different disability levels. I-BaR combines ankle-foot preparation, balance, and stepping phases into a cohesive process. It offers multi-modal feedback: visual feedback via virtual reality, vestibular feedback through robotic platform-induced perturbations, and proprioceptive feedback using haptic feedback, enabling patients to improve their balance abilities comprehensively.