Analysis of principal components concerning joint angles and joint moments during human gait including stairs and slopes

Abstract

In human gait motion analysis, which is one useful method for efficient physical rehabilitation to define various quantitative evaluation indices, joint angles and joint moments are measured during gait. On the one hand, human keeps a high correlation among the motion of all joints during gait. Joint motion analysis of the correlation extracts a few simultaneously activating segmental coordination patterns, and the structure of the intersegmental coordination is attracting attention to an expected relationship with a control strategy. However, when the evaluation method using singular value decomposition has been applied to only the restrained unnatural gait by laboratory, natural gait on stairs and slopes as the activities of daily living has not yet been considered. In this paper, analysis of principal components concerning joint angles and joint moments during gait based on the focus on upstairs, downstairs, upslopes and downslopes is aimed to clarify spatial coordination patterns of practical human gait. Each physical parameter of healthy subjects is measured by using mobile force plate and attitude sensor. As a result of the experiments and data analysis, singular value decomposition extracts the motion pattern with high correlation from the physical feature quantities and specific points of differences between gait environments are revealed. In the end, consideration of mutual comparison is performed from a biodynamic viewpoint and the validity of quantitative evaluation is verified.

Keywords

• biomechanics
• gait analysis
• stairs
• slopes
• singular value decomposition
• joint angle
• joint moment
• mobile force plate
• attitude sensor