Biomechanics of Human Movement

The biomechanics of human motion is a fascinating field. Who among us has never marveled at the graceful motions of a dancer or the rapid finger movements of a musician? From the time of Aristotle onward there have been countless books written on the topic of movement in animals and humans. Despite the great minds that have considered the topic, it is just recently that much advancement has been made experimentally. Historically, the study of human movement has been costly and very time consuming. This is because, in order to study them, movements are almost always discretized and then analyzed step by step, with the size of the steps determined by the speed of the movement (and the questions being asked). Whether it be frames of film from a movie camera or digitized samples from an electrogoniometer, most movements are recorded as series of static images that are then reassembled to provide kinematic and kinetic information. There has been a tremendous growth in the study of human movement in the past 2 decades because of the low cost of digital data acquisition systems that make possible the storage and analysis of massive amounts of data that are required to accurately characterize complex motion. This growing interest in the study of human movement is coming from five predominate groups: