Our research has focused on understanding how the individuals with and without functional impairments control their locomotor tasks, and how this knowledge might be applied to provide mechanisms for clinical gait rehabilitation and/or athletic training in these populations. Currently, we are conducting the following research projects.
The goal of this project is to characterize the gait mechanics and to establish scientific information for gait rehabilitation for individuals with lower extremity amputation in clinical settings. Our recent studies demonstrated unique compensatory strategies required for stair climbing and level walking at various speeds in individuals with unilateral transfemoral amputation.
Our research includes an investigation of how athletes with lower limb amputation adapt to recently running-specific fiber running-specific prostheses (RSPs ). The information will provide us with a basis for a better understanding of adaptive prosthetic control and is expected to aid in developing RSPs.
Spring-like leg behavior is a general feature of a bouncing gait such as running, hopping, or jumping. To describe this type of gait, the whole body is often modeled with a spring-mass model which consists of a body mass supported by a spring. So far, we found that the stiffness of the leg spring (leg stiffness) changes depending on the physiological and biomechanical demand.
General locomotion study requires subject recruitment and experimentation in the lab. and/or fields, but it could induce human errors and risk of injury during the experiment. However, the recent development of ‘open-sourced biomechanics datasets’ changed the data collection and analysis in the field of Biomechanics. We use publicly-available open-sourced datasets (e.g. ground reaction force, joint kinematics, and tics) to investigate biomechanical principle of human locomotion.
