ncts

The fluency of hips sway has recently been indicated as an index of the level of experience, muscular fatigue and mental stress of a professional athlete, as well as a possible index of the onset of a neurological syndrome (such as the Parkinson’s disease), of musculoskeletal disorders, and of rehabilitation progress in post-surgical patients. In sports science as well as in biomechanics, it is of prime importance to be able to acquire measures of body movements wirelessly. In the present talk, we illustrate a smartphone-based acquisition procedure as well as a wireless interface to a personal computer. Once the data have been acquired under the form of gyroscopic signals, it is necessary to process such signals through a mathematical algorithm that is able to reveal the sought fluency feature. In the talk, we present a novel fluency index, termed “geometric jolt”, whose definition is based on the calculus on manifolds and that is computed as the second covariant derivative of a velocity vector field over the special orthogonal group.