Effects of a stroboscopic visual perturbation on postural control in female athletes afterwards reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament

Athletes were initially subjected to experimental protocols of activities that involved the use of bandages, to cover the single eye or very simple coordination exercises but done with the eyes closed. Revolutionary as they might have been in their time, as they passed over the years, technology has evolved, like everything else. Currently, the so-called stroboscopic glasses are widely used (Senaptec, Strobe, Nike, Inc, Beaverton, OR), patented by two Italians, Science Vision Train Academy in 2014, the result of studies to treat dyslexia (as they believed that a child with dyslexia, if learned to use better eyes, consequently improved writing and reading) here are born tools with which it is possible, wearing them, to adjust the decrease of the visual input in an increasing way, but without limiting it completely; it obstructs the subjects' vision and works intermittently.

The interruption of visual feedback combined with traditional rehabilitation can mimic requests for actual activity through a load intensified on the neurocognitive system and facilitate the transition activity (Grooms et al., 2020).

The essential difference between this tool compared to traditionals, consists of being able to gradually regulate the intermittence of the obstruction, a fundamental factor in the adaptation of the subject to the visual stimulus to which he is subjected.

In recent years, more and more clubs and sports have started using this technology and carrying out countless tests and tests to understand its actual usefulness; from these, it emerged that in sports such as football, helps players improve their vision and reading of the game, improves cognitive functions, attention, processing speed, working memory and decision making, football is a sport situational, the improvements observed on the players were more marked in comparison to the others.

Nike has invested heavily in the project, carrying out batteries consisting of 10 sensorimotor tasks, such as visual clarity, contrast sensitivity, perception depth, multiple object tracking. All these exercises stimulated in the subjects an improvement of the motor sense integration, in the control of attention, in the management of anxiety below pressure and decision-making skills.

There have been other studies such as ad example the one was done by De Lucia, aimed at understanding if they can improve the ability to judge collision times (as in driving) therefore subjects were subjected to an experimental protocol in which a computer simulation was carried out with moving objects, in two separate experiments in which the object would once approach to the participants, while in the other it would have deflected towards a target, the subjects should have pushed a button at the exact moment they believed he had hit them or the target.

From there it emerged that prolonged stroboscopic training produces in athletes a performance improvement, constant error reduction e protects the performance of lateral eye movement from degradation. Even in the surgery department in Houston, Texas, given the need to increase the number of surgeons, activity protocols were carried out experiments on trainee surgeons with stroboscopic glasses. From these was found that wearing glasses improved the performance of subjects of the sample group (with glasses) compared to the control group, in complex tasks such as sutures, even in novice surgeons.