Date:
29 Apr 2014
Presenters:
Chuang-Yuan Chiu, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Biography
Chuang-Yuan Chiu is currently a PhD student in the Centre for Aquatics Research and Education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He graduated with the BS and MS degrees in mathematics, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan, in 2007 and 2008. His research interests include anthropometry, sports biomechanics, human modeling, pattern recognition and computer vision.
Synopsis
Body Segment Parameter (BSP) data comprising segmental mass and centre of mass positions are necessary for inverse dynamics estimation of whole body kinematic and kinetics. This is particularly important in swimming because directly measuring the forces affecting the motion of a swimmer is difficult. Jensen (1978) developed an ‘elliptical zone method’ to model the human body as a series of elliptical cylindroids. The diameters of the elliptical ‘zones’ are obtained by tracing the outlines of body segments from photographic images of the front and side views of a subject. BSP data are then calculated based on the known volumes and density of the elliptical cylindroids. A user-friendly MATLAB program (eZone) for use on a PC (Deffeyes & Sanders, 2005) has been applied in swimming research (McCabe & Sanders, 2012). Currently, the program requires manual digitisation of segmental landmarks and manual tracing of the body segment outlines as input. The purpose of this study was to further develop the approach by enabling automatic digitising and tracing thereby decreasing the manual operations and time required for the analysis process.