The accidental untying of a shoelace while walking often occurs without warning. In this paper, we discuss the series of events that lead to a shoelace knot becoming untied. First, the repeated impact of the shoe on the floor during walking serves to loosen the knot. Then, the whipping motions of the free ends of the laces caused by the leg swing produce slipping of the laces. This leads to eve...

Twenty patients with a subtalar dislocation of the foot are reported in this series. Thirteen cases had medial subtalar dislocation, 4 lateral, 2 posterior and 1 anterior. Open dislocation occurred in 2 cases. Manual reduction was successful in 16 cases and surgical reduction was necessary in 4. A short leg cast was applied for 36 weeks. There were no cases of aseptic necrosis of the talus. Exc...

In this paper a new area based technique is proposed for deriving gait signatures by decomposing the human body into three independent structural segments such as head node, arm swing and leg swing areas. Initially, all the feature points are represented as the sides of an n-sided polygon for calculating the area of each region. This technique induces surplus noise in the feature points which i...

This paper describes experiments with an electrically actuated one legged hopping robot the ARL Monopod While a spring mass system comprised of the leg spring and the body mass has previously provided the basic passive dynamic vertical motion we have now added a spring in se ries with the hip actuator to use the same passive dynamic principle for the leg swing motion This paper validates our pr...

The Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton is the first functional energetically autonomous load carrying human exoskeleton and was demonstrated at U.C. Berkeley, walking at the average speed of 0.9 m/s (2 mph) while carrying a 34 kg (75 lb) payload. The original published controller, called the BLEEX Sensitivity Amplification Controller, was based on positive feedback and was designed to increas...

This study examined the effect of the HamSprint Drills training programme and conventional football practice warm-up on lower limb neuromuscular control. The purpose-built active movement extent discrimination apparatus was used to assess lower limb neuromuscular control in 29 footballers from one professional Australian Football League club. Without vision of the contact point, participants pe...

Individuals with unilateral below-knee amputation expend more energy than non-amputees during walking and exhibit reduced push-off work and increased hip work in the affected limb. Simple dynamic models of walking suggest a possible solution, predicting that increasing prosthetic ankle push-off should decrease leading limb collision, thereby reducing overall energy requirements. We conducted a ...

Neural output from the locomotor system for each arm and leg influences the spinal motoneuronal pools directly and indirectly through interneuronal (IN) reflex networks. While well documented in other species, less is known about the functions and features of convergence in common IN reflex system from cutaneous afferents innervating different foot regions during remote arm and leg movement in ...

It is now well recognized that muscle activity can be induced even in the paralyzed lower limb muscles of persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) by imposing locomotion-like movements on both of their legs. Although the significant role of the afferent input related to hip joint movement and body load has been emphasized considerably in previous studies, the contribution of the "alternate" leg mo...

Reciprocally linked orthoses used for paraplegic walking have some form of linkage between the two hip joints. It has been assumed that flexion of the swinging leg is driven by extension of the stance leg. The aims of this study were to investigate the moments generated around the hip joint by the two cables in a Louisiana State University Reciprocating Gait Orthosis (LSU-RGO). Six (6) subjects...