|
|
|
Recently, many researches related to measurement of walking or running have been reported to analyze human gait. In these researches, it is important to measure the Ground Reaction Force (GRF) because the GRF is the only external force acting on human body during walking or running except for the gravity. In athletic sports, athletes wear spike shoes of which soles are not flat, but have many pins. Because the GRF of a runner wearing spike shoes is larger than that of a runner wearing other shoes, it is predicted that the pins contribute to the increase of the GRF and faster running. Additionally, it is also predicted that most part of the GRF acts on the spike pins biting an athletic field. Therefore, it is important to evaluate forces and torques acting on spike pins to analyze the function of shoes or running of athletes.
In this research, we reports on a method to measure forces and torques acting on spike pins by embedding sensor chips in the root of spike pins. Conventional force/torque sensors cannot be embedded in spike pins which are 2-3 mm in radius, because of the size or shape of the sensors. Therefore, we fabricated a 6-axis force/torque sensor chip with a size of 2 mm × 2 mm × 0.3 mm which was able to be embedded in spike pins. The sensor chip was covered with thin polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and embedded in spike-pin-shaped epoxy resin. After the spike-pin-shaped sensor was calibrated to forces and torques, walking experiment was conducted with this calibrated sensor.
References :
1.Hiroshi Ishidou, Hidetoshi Takahashi, Akihito Nakai, Tomoyuki Takahata, Kiyoshi Matsumoto and Isao Shimoyama, “6-Axis force/torque sensor for spike pins of sports shoes,”; The 28th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS 2015), Estoril, Portugal, pp. 257-260, January 18-22, 2015. [Procedding]
|
