Dynamical Analysis of Human Walking

The inverse dynamics approach is commonly adopted in a human gait analysis. Displacements of the human body segments and ground reaction forces are known from measurements. The joint reaction forces and muscle net torques (which cannot be measured directly) are calculated. Since the ground reaction forces are known it is not necessary to model the foot-ground contact. The inverse dynamics approach requires measured displacements to be differentiated twice in order to obtain accelerations. The choice of filtering and smoothening methods affects significantly the obtained results (Allard et al., 1995, Vint & Hinrichs, 1996). The errors in alignment of ground reaction force and foot affect the results as well (McCaw & DeVita, 1995).