The effect of foot compliance encoded in the windlass mechanism on the energetics of human walking
Abstract
The human foot, which is the part of the body
that interacts with the environment during locomotion, consists
of rich biomechanical design. One of the unique designs of
human feet is the windlass mechanism. In a previous simulation
study, we found that the windlass mechanism seems to improve
the energy efficiency of walking. To better understand the
origin of this efficiency, we here conduct both simulation and
experimental studies exploring the influence of foot compliance,
which is one of the functionalities that the windlass mechanism
embeds, on the energetics of walking. The studies show that
walking with compliant feet incurs more energetic costs than
walking with stiff feet. The preliminary results suggest that the
energy saved by introducing the windlass mechanism does not
originate from the compliance it embeds. We speculate that the
energy savings of the windlass mechanism are related more to
its contribution to reducing the effective foot length in swing
than to providing compliance in stance.
BibTeX
@conference{Song-2013-102730,author = {Seungmoon Song and Christopher LaMontagna and Steven Collins and Hartmut Geyer},
title = {The effect of foot compliance encoded in the windlass mechanism on the energetics of human walking},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC '13)},
year = {2013},
month = {July},
pages = {3179 - 3182},
publisher = {IEEE},
}