Presentation Type
Presentation
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Richard Willy
Faculty Mentor’s Department
School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences
Abstract / Artist's Statement
Knee and Achilles tendon injuries are the most common injuries experienced by runners. New advances in wearable devices and simple, low cost force plates now allow for the estimation of impact forces and stride lengths during outdoor running or in clinical settings; Impact forces and stride lengths may be able to predict gold standard measures of knee and Achilles tendon forces. If so, the estimation of knee and Achilles tendon forces in by clinicians would be feasible using wearable devices, outside a laboratory setting. Thus, we hypothesized that impact forces and stride lengths (our two surrogate measures) would predict the gold standard measures of knee forces and Achilles tendon forces during running.
A large database of healthy runners (52 healthy males; 52 healthy females) was used in our analysis. Briefly, each participant ran at 3.3 meters/sec as 3-D running mechanics were assessed with a motion capture system. Knee and Achilles tendon forces during the run trials were then calculated (our gold standard) and compared with impact forces and stride lengths (the proposed surrogates) derived from force plates via Pearson correlations. We found that impact forces were weak predictors of knee (p=0.0001, r=0.33) and Achilles tendon (p=0.0001, r=0.31) loads, and stride length was a weak to moderate predictor of peak knee (p
Previous work indicated wearable devices or a simple force plate accurately measure stride length and impact force data in the field or in a clinic, potentially increasing the ability to predict possibly injury and track training loads. However, our analysis found only weak to moderate relationships, suggesting that caution should be used when using impact forces and stride lengths are used to estimate knee and Achilles tendon forces. Thus, wearable devices and force plates are not yet able to estimate anatomical-specific forces i.e., knee and Achilles tendon forces, during running and consumers should be skeptical of commercial devices that claim to do so.
Category
Life Sciences
Predicting Knee and Achilles Tendon Forces for Injury Prevention
Knee and Achilles tendon injuries are the most common injuries experienced by runners. New advances in wearable devices and simple, low cost force plates now allow for the estimation of impact forces and stride lengths during outdoor running or in clinical settings; Impact forces and stride lengths may be able to predict gold standard measures of knee and Achilles tendon forces. If so, the estimation of knee and Achilles tendon forces in by clinicians would be feasible using wearable devices, outside a laboratory setting. Thus, we hypothesized that impact forces and stride lengths (our two surrogate measures) would predict the gold standard measures of knee forces and Achilles tendon forces during running.
A large database of healthy runners (52 healthy males; 52 healthy females) was used in our analysis. Briefly, each participant ran at 3.3 meters/sec as 3-D running mechanics were assessed with a motion capture system. Knee and Achilles tendon forces during the run trials were then calculated (our gold standard) and compared with impact forces and stride lengths (the proposed surrogates) derived from force plates via Pearson correlations. We found that impact forces were weak predictors of knee (p=0.0001, r=0.33) and Achilles tendon (p=0.0001, r=0.31) loads, and stride length was a weak to moderate predictor of peak knee (p
Previous work indicated wearable devices or a simple force plate accurately measure stride length and impact force data in the field or in a clinic, potentially increasing the ability to predict possibly injury and track training loads. However, our analysis found only weak to moderate relationships, suggesting that caution should be used when using impact forces and stride lengths are used to estimate knee and Achilles tendon forces. Thus, wearable devices and force plates are not yet able to estimate anatomical-specific forces i.e., knee and Achilles tendon forces, during running and consumers should be skeptical of commercial devices that claim to do so.