The maneuverability demonstrated by the weakly electric ghost knifefish (Apteronotus albifrons) is a result of its highly flexible ribbon-like anal fin, which extends nearly three-quarters the length of its body and is composed of approximately 150 individual fin rays. To understand how movement of the anal fin controls locomotion we examined kinematics of the whole fin, as well as selected ind...

The objective of this prospective study was to determine the prevalence of gait abnormalities in a cohort of Swedish pugs by using an owner-based questionnaire targeting signs of gait abnormality and video footage showing the dog's gait. This study also evaluated associated conditions of abnormal gait, including other health disorders prevalent in the breed. Five hundred and fifty (550) pugs re...

Gait phase is widely used for gait trajectory generation, gait control and gait evaluation on lower-limb exoskeletons. So far, a variety of methods have been developed to identify the gait phase for lower-limb exoskeletons. Angular sensors on lower-limb exoskeletons are essential for joint closed-loop controlling; however, other types of sensors, such as plantar pressure, attitude or inertial m...

Increasing the energy autonomy of a hopping one-legged robot is studied in this paper. For a particular passive gait, of all those possible, the energy dissipated per unit length of travel is shown to be less than for any other gait. This optimal gait is identified analytically, by exploiting the commonly used SLIP model to simplify real robot dynamics. Both mechanical and electrical losses are...

Effective gait rehabilitation is challenging, often requiring strenuous effort from a therapist, or expensive technology, or both. One rehabilitation method involves assisting the patient’s foot through a gait-like trajectory. While numerous devices have been developed to address the gait training needs of adults, these tools do not always scale well to meet the needs of a child’s smaller body ...

Background and purpose - Idiopathic clubfoot can be bilateral or unilateral; however, most studies of gait have assessed clubfoot cases as one uniform group. The contralateral foot in children with unilateral clubfoot has shown deviations in pedobarographic measurements, but it is seldom included in studies of gait. We evaluated gait in children with idiopathic clubfoot, concentrating on foot i...

objectives: this paper describes further improvement and preliminarily evaluation of a novel viscoelastic ankle-foot prosthesis prototype. the objective was to control the ankle hysteresis at slow and normal walking speeds. methods: inspired by the ankle biomechanics, in which the hysteresis differs based on the gait speeds, a manually damping control mechanism imbedded in the prosthesis for ad...

We present a random walk, fractal analysis of the stride-to-stride fluctuations in the human gait rhythm. The gait of healthy young adults is scale-free with long-range correlations extending over hundreds of strides. This fractal scaling changes characteristically with maturation in children and older adults and becomes almost completely uncorrelated with certain neurologic diseases. Stochasti...

Human gait is one of the biometric methods used for identifying humans unobtrusively and from a distance. Gait analysis using wearable sensors is a low-cost, handy and capable way of providing valuable information for many applications. Gait analysis using wearable sensors shows great prospects in biometrics as well as in medical applications. With the development of sensor technology and the a...

Human identification by gait has created a great deal of interest in computer vision community due to its advantage of inconspicuous recognition at a relatively far distance. Biometric systems are becoming increasingly important, since they provide more reliable and efficient means of identity verification. Biometric gait Analysis (i.e. recognizing people from the way they walk) is one of the r...