Abstract
Loaded walking with typical rigid backpack results in a significant increase in the mechanical energy of the stance leg and a decrease in lateral stability. Allowing the load to swing, which has been applied in shoulder pole, a tool widely used in Asia for load carriage assistance, may attenuate these effects. This paper theoretically analyzes and experimentally validates the biomechanical and energetic effects of the swinging loads. When walking with a 30 kg load, allowing the load to swing reduces the fore-aft leg impulses by over 19% and further reduces the mechanical energy of the stance leg by 12.9% compared to the typical rigid backpack. The whole-body metabolic cost has no significant change, which may be attributed to the increase in the muscle work of the upper body and the leg swing. Moreover, the load movement out of phase to the human in the lateral direction reduces the lateral excursion of extrapolated center-of-mass by 27.2%, indicating an increase in the lateral margin of stability and implying an improvement in lateral stability. The results demonstrate that allowing the load to swing reduces the horizontal leg impulses and the mechanical energy of the stance leg, and improves the lateral stability of human walking.
Highlights
C ARRYING loads with a backpack is a common and important task in human society
To validate the hypothesis we proposed above, we compared the biomechanical and energetic responses of 8 human adult subjects walking with rigidly-attached loads and with the swinging loads
The benefits include the reduction in horizontal ground reaction forces (GRF) and the mechanical energy of the stance leg, and the improvement of lateral stability
Summary
C ARRYING loads with a backpack is a common and important task in human society. the additionalManuscript received September 24, 2020; revised December 28, 2020 and January 23, 2021; accepted January 25, 2021. Aiming at attenuating these effects, people have developed a variety of load carriage tools: elastically suspended backpacks [8]–[13] regulate the temporal distribution of load pressure induced by the vertical acceleration of loads; exoskeletons and exosuits [14]–[19] provide additional torque to human joints; and supernumerary robotic limbs [20]–[22] transfer the forces caused by the load mass directly to the ground
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Schedule a callMore From: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
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