Song Seungmoon, LaMontagna Christopher, Collins Steven H, Geyer Hartmut
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2013;2013:3179-82. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2013.6610216.
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.
人类的脚是身体在运动过程中与环境相互作用的部分，具有丰富的生物力学设计。人类脚部独特的设计之一是跖腱膜机制。在之前的一项模拟研究中，我们发现跖腱膜机制似乎能提高行走的能量效率。为了更好地理解这种效率的来源，我们在此进行了模拟和实验研究，探讨足部顺应性（这是跖腱膜机制所包含的功能之一）对行走能量消耗的影响。研究表明，与僵硬的脚行走相比，顺应性的脚行走会产生更多的能量消耗。初步结果表明，引入跖腱膜机制节省的能量并非源于其所包含的顺应性。我们推测，跖腱膜机制节省的能量更多地与其在摆动期减少有效脚长的作用有关，而非在支撑期提供顺应性。
