Zeitschrift für neuartige Physiotherapien

Abstrakt

Intervention of Self-Monitoring Body Movement has an Immediate Beneficial Effect to Maintain Postural Stability

Kazuhiro Yasuda, Tsubasa Kawasaki and Takahiro Higuchi

Clinicians in rehabilitation sometimes encourage patients to become consciously aware of somatosensory inputs from the body. However, it is still unclear whether such intervention has any beneficial role on human postural control. The present study conducted two experiments to investigate whether an intervention involving conscious awareness of the body (i.e., self-monitoring) contributes to improved ability of postural control as measured immediately after an intervention of self-monitoring. All participants were subjected to four interventions: (a) self-monitoring actual movement (referred to as “move + monitoring” condition), (b) self-monitoring the imagined movement (“imagery”), (c) actual movement without self-monitoring (“move + arithmetic”), and (d) performing an arithmetic task without movement (“arithmetic”). The amounts of postural sway among measurements after the four interventions were compared. The results showed that, for the unipedal posture, but not for the bipedal posture, postural stability was higher after the move + monitoring intervention. This suggests that the self-monitoring activity is beneficial to postural control when maintaining upright posture is more challenging. Postural stability was also higher after the imagery condition, ensuring that the beneficial effects would have resulted from the activity of self-monitoring itself but not simply from accurate movement. These results were replicated in the two experiments, showing the reliability of the data. Interestingly, such beneficial effects were evident not only when participants self-monitored the movement of the ankle joint, i.e., the joint which is directly involved in upright postural control, but also when they self-monitored movement of the wrist (Experiment 1) or shoulder (Experiment 2).Therefore, the beneficial effects of self-monitoring are likely to be independent of the body parts used for self-monitoring.