Gait analysis

Overview:

We were attempting to understand how various components of a person's body affect their gait. In order to complete the gait project, we disassembled the object of our choice and listed every component. The components of the object, their connections, functions, and methods of energy transmission have to be identified.In order to anticipate a person's physical attribute for this project, we had to examine how they walk.

Understanding the energy and force underlying a person's gait is the fundamental idea in gait analysis. According to Newton's third law, every action has a corresponding and opposing response. You exert force on the earth when you plant your foot there. After gaining an understanding of the forces and energy that go into someone's stride, we looked at specific information about a person to forecast how their gait relates to their height, weight, leg length, and stride length. Finding the relationship between a person's gait and other details about them, such as their height, weight, or leg length, is another goal of research. We predicted that people with longer legs would experience a greater g-force than people with shorter legs.

With the initial phase of this research, we began gaining experience with gait analysis. We were tasked with creating gait frequency graphs and identifying characteristics of the data that could help us distinguish between adults and children. We discovered that the maximum values for step times varied between adults and children. Adults were more likely to be found among those whose steps were more than 0.54 seconds on average than among those whose steps took less than 0.54 seconds on average. Then, information from unidentified participants was given to us so that we could distinguish between children and adults.

Our Procedure:

• Measure each subjects leg length, height, and weight

• Download the app “Physics Toolbox” onto iPhone for accelerometer

• Tape phone onto subject’s waist

• Place a meter stick at their feet with their toes at 0 cm

• Press record on accelerometer and have them walk 20 steps

• Take a slow motion video of their first step and record distance

• Record time for travel on a stopwatch

• Repeat with 5 different subjects

• Enter data into Google Sheets

Our work:

Reflection:

Throughout this project I learned new things and learned how to work together as a group. This project prepared me and my group for our Senior Capstone project. We made some errors along the way and used perseverance and a growth mindset to keep going. We learned that it is impossible for our G-force to reach the level of 10. This means that our data was not exactly accurate. We learned that due to our data being inaccurate; our first attempt at making a predictive model was also incapable of predicting accurately. However, we continued to work on our predictive model and eventually found an equation that proved we can predict the height of someone based on how far they walked. We learned new skills using the Physics Toolbox App and we found ways to work through issues we had with our data. Although our first predictive model was a failed attempt, we persevered and came to one we feel confident in.

We believe we could have improved on the planning and accuracy of this project because our data was not completely accurate. If we realized our data was inaccurate sooner, we may have been able to fix this problem more efficiently. Our group excelled in communication as we discussed the project outside of class by texting each other regarding tasks and the presentation. In conclusion, I learned a lot from this project and I believe that our group worked very well together.