Identification of Motive Forces on the Whole Body System during Walking.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Acoustics and Vibration Volume 2010, Article ID 474695, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2010/474695 Research Article Identification of Motive Forces on the Whole Body System during Walking Raghdan J. AlKhoury,1 Suraj Joshi,1 Rama B. Bhat,1 and Shiping Ma2 1 Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Concordia University, Sir George Williams Campus, 1515 St. Catherine Street West, Montreal, QC, Canada H3G 2W1 ´ 2 Department of Exercise Science, Concordia University, Loyola Campus, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, Canada H4B 1R6 ´ Correspondence should be addressed to Suraj Joshi, sjoshi@encs.concordia.ca Received 28 June 2010; Accepted 13 September 2010 Academic Editor: K. M. Liew Copyright © 2010 Raghdan J. AlKhoury et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Motive forces by muscles are applied to different parts of the human body in a periodic fashion when walking at a uniform rate. In this study, the whole human body is modeled as a multidegree of freedom (MDOF) system with seven degrees of freedom. In view of the changing contact conditions with the ground due to alternating feet movements, the system under study is considered piecewise time invariant for each half-period when one foot is in contact with the ground. Forces transmitted from the body to the ground while walking at a normal pace are experimentally measured and numerically simulated. Fourth-order Runge- Kut