How human musculoskeletal system deals with the heel strike initiated shock waves

Objective The objective for this work was to investigate how the human musculoskeletal system deals with propagation and attenuation of the shock wave initiated at the heel strike. An experiment was designed to evaluate the shock wave on both tibial tuberosities and forehead. By analyzing data collected from the experiments, this work aimed to find how the human body could attenuate the heel strike initiated shock waves and to protect the head from overloading.Design 30 volunteers were run on a treadmill for two minutes at four different progressive speeds and the accelerations were recorded from both tibial tuberosities and forehead by using skin-mounted accelerometers.Background There has been increasing interest in the effects of shock waves on the musculoskeletal system. Voloshin and Wosk [ ] examined the values of the amplitude of the propagated waves, which leads to the conclusion that the human locomotor system possesses reduced the heel strike initiated shock waves and tries to prevent overloading of the head from insufficiently attenuated shock waves [ , ]. Voloshin [3] rated effects of running shoe to attenuate shock waves. It was found that in absolute terms there is no particular shoe that has best performance in absorbing shock waves for all the subjects. Voloshin, Bejjani, Halpern and Frankel [2] found out that the percussive nature of Flamenco dance correlated with increase in urogenital disorders, as well as back and neck pain and this may be related to the shock waves generated by the Flamenco dance. Method 30 young healthy volunteers participated in this study. Each subject was walking or running on the treadmill at four different progressive speeds for 30 seconds at each speed. The heel strike induced shock waves were recorded on both tibial tuberosities and forehead. MATLAB and EXCEL were used for data analysis.