Abstract
Humans walk, run, and change their speed in accordance with circumstances. These gaits are rhythmic motions generated by multi-articulated movements, which have specific spatiotemporal patterns. The kinematic characteristics depend on the gait and speed. In this study, we focused on the kinematic coordination of locomotor behavior to clarify the underlying mechanism for the effect of speed on the spatiotemporal kinematic patterns for each gait. In particular, we used seven elevation angles for the whole-body motion and separated the measured data into different phases depending on the foot-contact condition, that is, single-stance phase, double-stance phase, and flight phase, which have different physical constraints during locomotion. We extracted the spatiotemporal kinematic coordination patterns with singular value decomposition and investigated the effect of speed on the coordination patterns. Our results showed that most of the whole-body motion could be explained by only two sets of temporal and spatial coordination patterns in each phase. Furthermore, the temporal coordination patterns were invariant for different speeds, while the spatial coordination patterns varied. These findings will improve our understanding of human adaptation mechanisms to tune locomotor behavior for changing speed.
Highlights
Humans walk, run, and change their speed at will depending on their circumstances
The time series of seven elevation angles were decomposed by singular value decomposition after being separated into the DS and stance phase (SS) phases for walking and SS and FL phases for running (Figure 1)
The whole-body movement was revealed to be composed of the average posture and only two sets of principal intersegmental and temporal coordination patterns irrespective of the phase and gait (Table 1)
Summary
Run, and change their speed at will depending on their circumstances. These gaits are rhythmic motions generated by multi-articulated movements that have specific spatiotemporal patterns. The stance leg during running behaves like a spring, with knee bending (Cavagna et al, 1976) Many kinematic parameters, such as stride length and gait cycle, change at different gaits and speeds (Nilsson et al, 1985). When three elevation angles of the thigh, shank, and foot of one leg in the sagittal plane were plotted for one gait cycle, the trajectory lay close to a plane, which has been referred to as the planar law (Borghese et al, 1996; Ivanenko et al, 2007) This low-dimensional structure explains the intersegmental coordination during locomotion. We analyzed measured data for both walking and running and compared the speed effect on the spatiotemporal kinematic coordination patterns between the gaits
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