Gait Analysis for Muscular Forces Evaluation in Human Movement: Integration Protocol of Typical Measurement Methods

Abstract

The paper focuses on the gait analysis for the investigation of the typical events occurring in human movements and validate its use as a method for musculoskeletal disease evaluation and for the improvement of athletic training. In the present research the motion capture system is combined with an in-house developed prototype of uniaxial force plates for the measurement of the vertical component of ground reaction forces during movement. While similar techniques are implemented for gait, this equipment can be employed to investigate running, thus, covering a larger number of possible applications and providing a deeper insight either of the athlete performance or the disease analysis. For the prevention and the treatment of those events occurring during running, a thorough understanding of its mechanisms is critical; therefore, a method for evaluating both the kinematic behavior of the human body and the ground reaction forces combined to a model for determining the muscle forces is proposed. An infrared motion capture technique is adopted for measuring accurately the body motion and a multiple force-plate system is used to calculate the force exerted by the ground and sub-divided in the three components by an ad-hoc developed routine. Moreover, the data are used as input parameters for the OpenSim software to derive muscles forces. Finally, the potential of the proposed protocol is determined by an experimental campaign on healthy subjects and a significant database of muscle forces is constructed for different running speeds.

A Statistical Approach for Modeling Individual Vertical Walking Forces

“…Ground reaction forces are measured adopting the force plate system developed by Fontanili et al [31] and shown in Figure 1. Each unit of the force plate system is a stand-alone uniaxial force platform composed of two aluminum plates.…”

“…Gait parameters of each step are randomly extracted from their probability distributions. Statistical characteristics of the walking gait parameters are estimated from the experimental tests conducted to measure individual walking forces through the force plate system developed by Fontanili et al [31]. Experimental tests involved three TSs and allowed measuring about 700 steps for each TS.…”