Using an algorithm designed by Golyski, Sawicki, PoWeR lab Ph.D. It features cameras mounted above a treadmill to track a person's movement using motion capture markers attached to the person. The purpose was to inject or extract energy during a stride, so that they could then measure how the person's leg and joint energies change.įor the experiment they used Georgia Tech's CAREN (Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment) - an integrated system used to study stability during movement.
Using a split-belt treadmill, they applied short, quick disturbances, known as perturbations, in the form of increases in belt speed to one leg during walking. Golyski and Sawicki designed an experiment with a person walking on a treadmill. "That provides a really powerful framework to relate all three of those areas." "The idea is that if we can relate stability to a demand in energy, then we can become accountants, and track how the energy - our currency - changes at the level of the person, muscle, and exoskeleton," Golyski said. They also knew that energy needed to be equal to mechanical energy at all levels of description of the leg, specifically the joints and muscles. The researchers knew that for a person walking at a steady speed on level ground, the net mechanical energy of the person and each leg over one stride - from the heel strike of one leg to the next heel strike of that same leg - is zero. To understand how all three pillars work together to help humans compensate during a fall, Golyski and Sawicki needed to come up with a new framework to measure stability. Because, while one can observe how muscle dynamics change with the use of an exoskeleton, how those changes relate to stability is not understood. But to examine how muscles both interact with exoskeletons and affect stability makes for an interesting challenge, Golyski says. Exoskeletons affect a person's stability while also affecting how their muscles work, and vice versa. For his graduate work at Georgia Tech, his aim was to develop an understanding of how devices and the human body work together, specifically at the intersection of three elements: muscle mechanics, wearable exoskeletons, and stability during walking.Įach of the three elements relates to the others. Golyski, a graduating member of Sawicki's Physiology of Wearable Robotics (PoWeR) Lab, previously worked as a research scientist with individuals with lower-limb amputation at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The paper also contributed to Golyski's selection as this year's recipient of the American Society of Biomechanics' (ASB) Pre-Doctoral Achievement Award. Their research, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, lays the groundwork for using mechanical energetics to understand the roles of joints and muscles during unsteady locomotion.
advisor Greg Sawicki, associate professor of mechanical engineering and biological sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, investigate whether mechanical energy can be used as a "common currency" to measure how humans use lower limbs to stabilize during walking. In newly published research, Pawel Golyski and his Ph.D.