Effects of body segment inertia parameters on biomechanical analysis of walking movement
2002 Volume 6 Issue 2 Pages 96-109
Details
2002 Volume 6 Issue 2 Pages 96-109
Effects of body segment inertia parameters (BSP) on biomechanical interpretation were investigated through the biomechanical analysis of walking at four speed levels.
Two subjects were asked to perform 15 walks at each speed level. The 15 walking trials in each speed level were measured using an automatic coordinate acquisition system and a force platform. Kinematic and kinetic variables were computed using five sets of BSP; 1) BSP 0: Average value for young adult athletes reported by Ae et al. (1992), 2) BSP 1: Average value for the elderly male reported by Okada et al. (1996), 3) BSP 2: Average value for the elderly female reported by Okada et al. (1996), 4) BSP 3: Average value for the aged cadavers reported by Chandler et al. (1975), 5) BSP 4: Average value for three-year-old children reported by Yokoi et al. (1986).
The significant differences of mechanical variables of walking movement appeared among BSP sets and among speed levels. However, the tendencies of differences in the mechanical variables among BSP sets were similar in all speed levels. Also, changes in the variables due to the increase in speed level were observed to have similar tendencies in five BSP sets. Therefore, as far as we apply one BSP to a certain subject and focus on relative characteristics of mechanical variables calculated by using a BSP set, the use of inappropriate BSP values may have little effect on the results and their interpretation obtained through the biomechanical analysis of human movement.
