Dance mat-style game helps stop older people falling | Hacker News Reader

Dance mat-style game helps stop older people falling

newscientist.com

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I heard that falls are lethal for the elderly. A fall can cause an injury, which requires rest to recuperate from, which deteriorates muscles that help balance, therefore being more likely to have another fall soon after recovering from the first. Leading to an eventually fatal cascade of events.

Post back surgery I had to do core and back strengthening and balance exercises. Standing on one leg, keeping my back straight, pivoting at the hips to pick up a water bottle or basketball, then stand up straight again, and repeating the action 10 times whilst staying on one leg, picking the thing up, and putting it back down. I felt like I was a 3-year old with how poor my balance was. It also made my feet hurt like a child made to walk to the shops.

Just tried the exercise again now after not doing it for a long time. Yep, still terrible. I actually thought it would be much easier since I do inline skating regularly, and can roll on one skate for a decent while even down to pretty low speeds. More to add to the regular fitness routine...

When I remember, whilst brushing my teeth, I'll stand on one foot for 30 seconds at a time. It's also surprisingly hard and tiring.

"When I remember, whilst brushing my teeth, I'll stand on one foot for 30 seconds at a time. It's also surprisingly hard and tiring."

Still, do it as often as possible. The trick is to make it a habit, to build it into your regular dayroutines. Also when you are waiting for something, when you are lying in bed - all opportunities to exercise and strenghten your weaknesses.

That would be good, but even better would be to practice daily a more complex exercise, like a tài-jí-quán form or a karate kata (executed slowly and without excessive force), both of which are excellent mobility and balance exercises for elderly people.

I doubt that "exergames" are as efficient as these traditional and proven methods, which require minimal space and time and no equipment.

Well, or Qui Gong. But not everyone can open themself towards it, so maybe for some those games are beneficial.

Another opportunity to stand one-legged is putting on and taking off shoes... Tie one shoe lace while standing on the other leg.

I watched in horror as an elderly lady shuffled up to the merest lip of a recessed curbstone, and full towards me. That horrid feeling that I could have dived in to catch them, instead just transfixed.

One of the reason why I posted this in the first place.

I know this sounds odd: but why not prescribe those individuals non-virilizing anabolic steroids for recuperation? Worst case scenario, you have some lipid imbalance, possibly liver enzyme increase and natural testosterone suppression at the end of healing. All of this would be extremely minimal.

Oxandrolone is already used in medicine for this purpose, but not nearly in as many indications as it would be useful.

They heavily increase healing and muscule cell proliferation via supercharging protein synthesis. They also prevent muscle wasting via maintaining nitrogen balance in your body.

You could have recovered much faster with this medication.

I've long felt that the taboo surrounding anabolic steroids prevents their therapeutic usage.

>I heard that falls are lethal for the elderly.

falls are lethal in general. I personally know of a man who broke his back and neck (two separate occasions) with shower falls, the last fall leaving him quadriplegic, and a distant relative died from the same thing.

I don't care enough to go reference hunting but I remember at one point reading that taking a shower is one of the most dangerous singular and common things that anyone does on a daily basis.

Several years ago I learned from the shop owner across the street that the guy who ran The Hippie Shop, a place I often visited, had a fatal accident while crossing the street in winter (icy conditions). It's still a downer, he was rather young, extremely friendly and his shop had this unique and lovely atmosphere that I still miss.

Shower accidents are a sub of home accidents, which is a sub of accidents. Accidents are, from recollection, in the top 5 causes of death.

Every time I wash my feet in the shower, and I mean this.. I stand on 1 foot, then the other soapy foot, and repeat to myself 'this is how I die'. Every time.

One of the reasons that bone breaks can be fatal is that bone marrow can escape into the bloodstream and cause blood clots. The result can be a fatal stroke. This is fairly common during hip breaks. My great-uncle went this way.

Gamifying fitness works fine, peer pressure does too. The gym I (41, male) go has quite a lot of pensioners due to the wide range of courses they offer. It's quite normal there to have a yoga course with people ranging ages from 20 to 70+.

We've still got the original Wii and use it with WiiFit and the Balance Board. Some of the games are fairly active too, they get you standing up, jigging around, stretching, and generally moving.

It's great to get feedback on things like their yoga moves, I firmly believe they are good for core strength and balance.

I appreciate it's not as rigid or intense as a gym could be, but it's very handy and fits in as and when we can. I've always been on the same opinion as another poster that "some exercise >>>>> no exercise, and also that moderate exercise >>>>> some exercise".

To put that in context, we're older, comparatively sedentary, and my wife has some medical issues with bone & muscle.

The Wiifit Balance Board is very cool and one of the very very rare cases where I tried to play with the hardware. I went through blog article after blog article, trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to it through Linux.

Then I realized there was already a proper device driver made years ago and the blog articles were vastly out of date. You can get the data directly using evdev on linux w/ Python.

It was such a fun device for a project too, my daughters enjoyed jumping on the balance board just to see what numbers it would toss out.

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be that hard to use it to develop balance games for Linux - the only problem is with battery life and the annoyance when pairing it.

Hey, are there any games like the wii fit thing or ddr for modern consoles? I mean, including the mats/boards.

It's kinda too late to get an original Wii but I do have a PS5.

This doesn't answer your question about newer consoles, but a brief glance at ebay turned up plenty of results for Wii systems with the balance board and game.

Ah well, it's sad. Was thinking of something for the living room and i'm not sticking a PC or another console in there.

But thanks all for the pointers.

If you include a computer as a modern console; There is StepMania, which is similar to DDR. I play it with an L-TEK EX PRO.

Further, there are a number of fitness VR games. I like Eleven VR and BeatSaber. The latter is available for PS5.

Nintendo has Ring Fit Adventure for the Switch.

Dance central spotlight for Xbox one

Nike kinect training for Xbox 360

Stepmania for pc

As someone who got very good at DDR at a young age, and is now older, it's clear that if you do any exercise which challenges your balance when you're young, your balance will be better when you're old. I haven't practiced slackline or DDR in decades and I don't really exercise now, but I can still walk across a log found during a hike like it's nothing. Strength may come and go, but balance is clearly some kind of long-term muscle memory.

I dunno about that.

I'm "getting on a bit" as they say. I was pretty active as a kid and am still a reasonably active 42 yr old now but I've noticed that when I go a few weeks without regular activity and the strengh diminishes, the balance goes with it.

I can totally understand how with ankles or core a bit weaker it would be easy to lose balance. Dunno how regular your hikes are but they are probably keeping you strong where you need to be, especially if there are hills involved.

I believe it degrades with a lack of use, it's just that you started from a higher level.

And note "found during a hike"--you're using your balance skills all the time out there when the ground is uneven. And hiking is certainly exercise.

Reminds me, I miss StepMania.

Off to build a new dance pad....

Hi, Mr. Calhoun! I’m sorry this is such an unorthodox way of reaching out to you, and I know this is probably off topic for the original thread, but I couldn’t really find another way to contact you. I had posted this same message on a comment yesterday, but it was pretty deep in a thread, so I thought I’d try again. I’m trying to get in touch with you about your raspberry pi TV project. I’m a 16 year old high school student, and my best friend loves retro tv and custom gifts, so I figured a great going away to college gift would be a project like this, loaded with all his favorite old (legally obtained) tv shows, and the videos of various musicals we’ve done together. I’ve been looking for a project very similar to yours for a few months now, and the closest thing I’ve found is a video describing a portable version of the project by a YouTube channel called Irish Craig Party. Unfortunately, it was the only video on the channel, the comments were turned off, and they had zero social media/github attached to the channel. I had to keep looking around for similar projects. I was totally willing to do some of the coding myself, but some fundamental challenges like the scheduling or the real time playback were a bit too intense for my admittedly barebones coding skills. Now I humbly come to you. You had mentioned that you were planning to open source it in a thread from a while ago, but you were debugging. Is there any way to get the code for this? I already have the vast majority of the parts, I’m willing to debug and modify it in any way, I just need the foundations. Thank you for hearing me out, I’m sorry for not finding a better way to reach out, and thank you for your time.

https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/UHF

For discussing custom dance pad designs, I love this discord:

https://discord.gg/TCn3emnwZU

My attempt is the one where you have one USB-C board per pad, so that I can use USB-PD instead of an external power source to drive the LEDs

Nice. I put together a PIU pad using a cheap Exceed Xbox pad attached to a plywood base with double sided painters tape and wrapped the whole thing in clear gauge vinyl. I use it with a variant of Stepmania called StepF2.

Attached a USB adapter and it's been my primary form of HIIT exercise for years now!

I would be very interested to see how this compares across demographics (think NHANES). I wonder if it could be turned into a check where clinicians measure baseline performance and use it to track reduction in performance over time. If it works, it could be an inexpensive way to identify individuals at risk of a fall before their motor control degrades enough to be at high risk.

An occupational therapist test I've seen is to lift one foot off the floor slightly and remain balanced with eyes closed. Time is the measure and anything over 10 seconds is "healthy".

This reminded me my grandparents who used to go to dance parties up to their 80s. They didn't have any falls I recall until they got onto deathbed.

Some of the past required training I had to do while in IT for Healthcare mentioned that a high proportion of falls in elderly patients isn't always due to a physical ailment but rather for the social attention it can bring.

The paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02739-0

And a non-paywalled article from the university:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/gamified-home-exerc...

The result:

> The rate of falls reported monthly over 12 months—the primary outcome of the trial—was significantly reduced in the exergame training group compared with the control group (incidence rate ratio = 0.74, 95% confidence interval = 0.56–0.98)

I'm not surprised, when I broke my leg and on the mend I had lost agility from disuse. Agility exercise is a great thing to have as part of your routine.

Aside from that, having health issues even if younger, I was surprised how valuable deadlift (with 5 to 10kg kettle bells) and squats were important for your body. The ability to go down softly without efforts or joint pain is such a relief.

Pretty much every study ever has concluded that some exercise >>>>> no exercise, and also that moderate exercise >>>>> some exercise.

Total anecdote, but aside from injuries and a brief period of wildly overtraining for university rowing, I have _never_, in my life thought after exercising "I feel worse than I did before starting". It's basically the magic pill.

yeah sure, physical exercise is vital, and even a few minutes everyday is a great boost for a lot of things in you

but I used to run / bike, and this didn't address the same movement as deep squat / dead lift affect

Running plus cycling is quite a feat already, if you do it serious. I'm a cyclist and 15 months into running I still dislike it but also know it's a good thing for me.

I was a runner first, but years made my knee joints brittle, and biking is amazing to avoid pain there. And talking about knee joints, single leg squats are magic to restore them a bit. I was quite surprised.

Why not swim.

I think about it regularly (cause swimming is one of the best kind of exercise I know of too) but it's less convenient logistically and also psychologically, you can't swim alone unless you have access to the sea or a clean calm river.

Yeah good point about solitary swimming.

Carefull though. I busted my knees combining intense ice skating (multiple hours per day) and explosive running/jumping (basketball). Two very distict movements for that area.

I was in a permanent state of back pain when my only exercise was cycling/running. Adding a bit of resistance training is what finally cured it.

I think that further reinforces the point - There's an enormous boost from doing anything at all. In most things, there's a pretty significant falloff in terms of the reward of what you're doing but with exercise, you get that for pretty much every step along the way. For you it's deadlifts, for me most recently it was bench presses relieving tension in my chest and upper shoulders and neck which was giving me headaches. I'm sure I'd get a similar return if I focused on deep squats or deadlifts for a little bit.

Have you tried the 'animal flow' trend thing ? dynamic poses on ground, using all 4, and partially walking that way ? it seems to hit all biomechanical spots softly.

Deep squats and deadlifts might just be the most useful strength exercises in your day to day life.

Your legs and your back are the two muscle groups you use the most. You always want to have good posture (deadlifts) and you always want to be able to move around easily (squats). Being the guy that opens any jar of pickles is cool and all, but those two alone definitely increase your QoL.

This is pretty interesting.

The cognitive-based game is not what I expected - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-smartstep-system-use... (Which they say didn't work)

Video of the smart±step https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQxzJDiTX4 which looks very boring but there seems to be other videos of walking through a village?

This is the hard bit - "2 hours a week"

But we have an old age problem. There is neither the skilled or unskilled labor to keep the homes running.

Just having an activity that people can do for 2 hours a week is a sell. Throw in less falls, which will mean less labor, is a sell. Subsidies because it's medical.

smart±step is not the only one around, it'd be interesting to see what stopping these being more ubiquitous. It's hard to tell if it actually works to stop falls, but the theory seem good.

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