Article

Since strictly related to balance and stability control, body center of mass
(CoM) kinematics is a relevant quantity in sport surveys. Many methods have been
proposed to estimate CoM displacement. Among them, segmental method appears to be
suitable to investigate CoM kinematics in sport: human body is assumed as a
system of rigid bodies, hence the whole-body CoM is calculated as the weighted
average of the CoM of each segment. The number of landmarks represents a crucial
choice in the protocol design process: one have to find the proper compromise
between accuracy and invasivity. In this study, using a motion analysis system, a
protocol based upon the segmental method is validated, adopting an anatomical
model comprising 14 landmarks. Two sets of experiments were conducted. Firstly,
our protocol was compared to the ground reaction force method (GRF), accounted as
a standard in CoM estimation. In the second experiment, we investigated the
aerial phase typical of many disciplines, comparing our protocol with: (1) an
absolute reference, the parabolic regression of the vertical CoM trajectory
during the time of flight; (2) two common approaches to estimate CoM kinematics
in gait, known as sacrum and reconstructed pelvis methods. Recognized accuracy
indexes proved that the results obtained were comparable to the GRF; what is
more, during the aerial phases our protocol showed to be significantly more
accurate than the two other methods. The protocol assessed can therefore be
adopted as a reliable tool for CoM kinematics estimation in further sport
researches.
CI - Copyright (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS