Nordic walking multibody analysis and experimental identification

Abstract

The widespread diffusion of Nordic walking as a trending sport discipline has increased the need for a tool to study the movement, both at the beginner and professional level. This article presents a methodology for the analysis of the body motion during Nordic walking. The main goal was to design a numerical tool able to replicate human body behaviour when performing this sport. With this approach, it is possible to study several biomechanical aspects, like the kinematics of each body segment, estimating loads applied to the joints for given tasks. Results can be used to compare the user movements with a standard technique implemented in the virtual environment. In fact, using a specific monitoring device developed in previous works, different parameters like the pole angle, arms cycle frequency and synchronization, as well as the pushing force applied to the ground, can be measured during the activity. This acquisition system can be used to save data to be compared with results from the standard numerical model, evaluating the user performance. In this work, numerical results were compared and discussed with measurements from the aforementioned device in terms of pole force and pole angle. The ground reaction force obtained with the multi-body model during Nordic walking was then compared with results from the literature.