About a year ago there were reports on work showing that the elderly can take advantage of stochastic resonance to enhance their ability to balance. Science News is reporting on work done at BU that showed a dramatic improvement in balance among people over 70. The amazing quote is:
we were effectively able to take 75 year old individuals and, by introducing noise, improve their balance ot the level of 20 year olds..
Here is a reference to early work on stochastic noise and balance from my heap...(at a popular level). A more recent paper appears in The Lancet.
This looks very easy to do and has the potential for dramatically improving the quality of life for many people.
The technique of injecting noise into non-linear systems to improve signal to noise ratios seems a bit counter-intuitive at first, but turns out to work very well in numerous applications.
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