A Review on Methods and Devices for Force Platforms Calibration in Medical Applications

Nowadays force platforms are widely employed both for diagnostic purposes and for monitoring the execution of motor tasks such as stance, both static and perturbed, and gait. Moreover, even if a clinical assessment based on the knowledge of the forces the patients can exchange with the environment can be useful, some guidelines are needed to determine the practical limitations of the measurements for motion analysis and postural control. In particular, in situ calibration is a fundamental practice especially when the force platforms are either used as reference or are connected with other devices in the measurement chain. Several calibration procedures for force platforms have been proposed in the literature, some of them dealing with only one force component, others with all the force and moment components, and some research groups have also developed and tested some innovative devices or introduced some corrective equations, performing either static or dynamic calibration