Heel-strike in walking: Assessment of potential sources of intra- and inter-subject variability in the activation patterns of muscles stabilizing the knee joint

Huber, Cora; Federolf, Peter; Nüesch, Corina; Cattin, Philippe C.; Friederich, Niklaus F.; Tscharner, Vinzenz von

doi:10.1016/j.jbiomech.2013.02.017

Cited by 14 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…As already discussed, human behavioral data exhibit high variability [25] [26]. Regrading inter-subject variability, it is easy to see in Figure 2 that subjects walk in a different manner, i.e.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 66%

The Complexity of Human Walking: A Knee Osteoarthritis Study

et al. 2014

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This study proposes a framework for deconstructing complex walking patterns to create a simple principal component space before checking whether the projection to this space is suitable for identifying changes from the normality. We focus on knee osteoarthritis, the most common knee joint disease and the second leading cause of disability. Knee osteoarthritis affects over 250 million people worldwide. The motivation for projecting the highly dimensional movements to a lower dimensional and simpler space is our belief that motor behaviour can be understood by identifying a simplicity via projection to a low principal component space, which may reflect upon the underlying mechanism. To study this, we recruited 180 subjects, 47 of which reported that they had knee osteoarthritis. They were asked to walk several times along a walkway equipped with two force plates that capture their ground reaction forces along 3 axes, namely vertical, anterior-posterior, and medio-lateral, at 1000 Hz. Data when the subject does not clearly strike the force plate were excluded, leaving 1–3 gait cycles per subject. To examine the complexity of human walking, we applied dimensionality reduction via Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis. The first principal component explains 34% of the variance in the data, whereas over 80% of the variance is explained by 8 principal components or more. This proves the complexity of the underlying structure of the ground reaction forces. To examine if our musculoskeletal system generates movements that are distinguishable between normal and pathological subjects in a low dimensional principal component space, we applied a Bayes classifier. For the tested cross-validated, subject-independent experimental protocol, the classification accuracy equals 82.62%. Also, a novel complexity measure is proposed, which can be used as an objective index to facilitate clinical decision making. This measure proves that knee osteoarthritis subjects exhibit more variability in the two-dimensional principal component space.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 66%

The Complexity of Human Walking: A Knee Osteoarthritis Study

et al. 2014

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“…All stride-cycle waveforms were normalized by setting the total intensity per cycle in each muscle to 1. Due to the normalization, information about the absolute magnitude of the muscle activity was lost, but the waveform shapes can be compared across muscles and between participants and hinge positions [ 20 ]. The EMG signal waveforms were taken for each muscle, cycle, athlete, and hinge position in order for the respected EMG peak intensity to be found.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Hinge Positioning in Cross-Country Ski Bindings Affect Exercise Efficiency, Cycle Characteristics and Muscle Coordination during Submaximal Roller Skiing

et al. 2016

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The purposes of the current study were to 1) test if the hinge position in the binding of skating skis has an effect on gross efficiency or cycle characteristics and 2) investigate whether hinge positioning affects synergistic components of the muscle activation in six lower leg muscles. Eleven male skiers performed three 4-min sessions at moderate intensity while cross-country ski-skating and using a klapskate binding. Three different positions were tested for the binding’s hinge, ranging from the front of the first distal phalange to the metatarsal-phalangeal joint. Gross efficiency and cycle characteristics were determined, and the electromyographic (EMG) signals of six lower limb muscles were collected. EMG signals were wavelet transformed, normalized, joined into a multi-dimensional vector, and submitted to a principle component analysis (PCA). Our results did not reveal any changes to gross efficiency or cycle characteristics when altering the hinge position. However, our EMG analysis found small but significant effects of hinge positioning on muscle coordinative patterns (P < 0.05). The changed patterns in muscle activation are in alignment with previously described mechanisms that explain the effects of hinge positioning in speed-skating klapskates. Finally, the within-subject results of the EMG analysis suggested that in addition to the between-subject effects, further forms of muscle coordination patterns appear to be employed by some, but not all participants.

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“…However, it is impossible to correctly model the actual (and constantly changing) mechanical and geometrical properties of the leg during a movement, and hence, it seems largely impossible to make anything but rough estimates about its vibrational properties. Consequently, the muscle tuning principle can serve as one of the reasons for high variability and high subject-specificity in impact responses (Huber et al, 2013), but future hypothesisdriven research is significantly hampered by the difficulty in developing precise predictions.…”

Section: Muscle Tuningmentioning

confidence: 99%

A discussion of the Muscle Tuning and the Preferred Movement Path concepts – comment on Nigg et al.

Federolf

Doix

Jochum³

2018

CISS

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Nigg and colleagues propose two new paradigms, the Muscle Tuning and the Preferred Movement Path concepts. The purpose of this commentary is to discuss plausibility and challenges of these two concepts. Both concepts are highly plausible from a mechanical point of view and they also go in line with every-day observations. The main challenges for the muscle tuning paradigm are that (a) this mechanism is only one of several mechanisms in how the body adapts to impacts, and (b) it is very difficult to develop testable predictions from this paradigm since the mechanical (vibrational) properties of the leg are highly subject-specific and complex. The main open questions regarding the preferred movement path paradigm relate to (a) its integration with the concepts for movement variability, and (b) to the circumstances under which the preferred movement path might change.

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Heel-strike in walking: Assessment of potential sources of intra- and inter-subject variability in the activation patterns of muscles stabilizing the knee joint

Cited by 14 publications

References 38 publications

The Complexity of Human Walking: A Knee Osteoarthritis Study

The Complexity of Human Walking: A Knee Osteoarthritis Study

How Hinge Positioning in Cross-Country Ski Bindings Affect Exercise Efficiency, Cycle Characteristics and Muscle Coordination during Submaximal Roller Skiing

A discussion of the Muscle Tuning and the Preferred Movement Path concepts – comment on Nigg et al.

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