Special Topic Course in Delft 2018

The Sports Engineering Institute of the TU Delft invited students from Delft, Shefflied, Chemnitz, Amsterdam and Vienna for a two-week Special Topic Course. In this annually course, students are having the unique chance to collaborate with students of Sports Science, Mechanical Engineering and Sports Engineering from different universities.

With the help of the great funds of the ISEA, I could take part on this unique course. The funds covered almost all of my accommodation and travel costs.

The main topic of the Special Topic Course was about all relevant sciences of the bikesport like Aerodynamics and Dynamics. During the lectures have always been room for interesting discussions. As a special bonus, some lectures were hold by specialist of famous dutch bike companies and bike team members. This was really interesting for me, because my plan for the future is to work in the bicycle industry as a R&D engineer.

Apart of this theoretical part of the course, we worked together in groups of max. four students on two practical projects, an innovation challenge and a simulation task. We had to meet ourself in our spare time and worked together on both projects. By being a well mixed group with students from Amsterdam, Sheffield, Delft and Vienna with different study backgrounds, each group member could benefits of the collaboration. As a highlight, we went on the last day to a velodrome for the final presentations of the innovation task and also for the simulation test. It was interesting to hear about the ideas of all other groups and how they solved the problems and tasks.

To come to an conclusion, I am very thankful for the funds of the ISEA because without them I couldn’t take part on this amazing course in Delft where I learned a lot in many aspects.

23rd International Congress of Snow Sports Trauma and Safety

The 23rd International Congress on Snow Sports Trauma and Safety (ISSS) was held in Squaw Valley, California on 7-13th April 2019. Thanks to the ISEA student engagement award I was able to present the findings of my PhD, through a presentation titled ‘Comparison of a Finite Element (FE) model for snowboard wrist protectors against an impact test’. As the student member of the executive committee I was also able to present on ‘How the ISEA supports snow sport safety’, providing more information to the ISSS about the ISEA, and enhancing links between the two communities.

The week was full of exciting talks and discussions on how we can make snow sports safer, from physicians, orthopaedic surgeons, experts in biomechanics and engineering, epidemiologists, ski patrollers and snow sports equipment manufacturers from all over the world. Attending this conference provided me with a chance to gain relevant and specific feedback from experts within snow sport safety on my project. As well as to share my research with members of the ISO 20320 working group, developing a standard for snowboard wrist protectors, which is on track for publication in the near future. The conference was also a great networking platform to meet people for potential job prospects as I come to the end of my PhD.

Being able to visit an Olympic ski resort, meet new people and experts in my field of research was a fantastic experience. The week got even better when at the conference banquet I was awarded the Sachiko Yahashi Award for the best young researcher at the conference. I am very grateful to the ISEA for helping to fund my trip to this great conference, it has given me great feedback on my research at a crucial time, aiding me to finalise my thesis and prepare for my viva defence.

Research exchange with Dr. Andrew Cresswell at University of Queensland

The financial support from the ISEA in form of the ISEA Student Engagement Award allowed me to partially fund a research exchange with Dr. Andrew Cresswell’s research group at the School of Human Movement & Nutrition Sciences, University of Queenland, Brisbance, Australia.

Dr. Cresswell’s laboratory is the leading research facility in assessing the mechanics of the human foot arch, intrinsic foot muscles, and in-vivo ultrasound imaging. My personal goals for this research exchange were to gain insight on the advantages and limitations of indwelling electromyography (EMG), and the assessment of foot arch mechanics in different footwear conditions. While visiting the lab, I had the pleasure to observe and participate in multiple studies, where, for example, the activity of intrinsic foot muscles and their influence on foot and lower limb mechanics were measured. For this, ultrasound-guided fine-wire electrodes were inserted into the foot (Figure 1) while 3D kinematic and kinetics were assessed during various jumping tasks (Figure 2) by a motion capture system and force plates, respectively. Further, a nerve block was used to inhibit the contracting abilities of the intrinsic foot muscles. Additionally, I was able to significantly extend my own analyses on the role of the arch and how its mechanics are affected by increased midsole bending stiffness of sport shoes. With great assistance from Drs. Luke Kelly and Ryan Riddick, I modelled the plantar muscle-tendon unit (plantar aponeurosis + intrinsic foot muscles) and its mechanics in different footwear conditions during running and jumping using previously collected data. This in-depth analysis of the interaction between multiple (in-series/in-parallel) compliances of the foot-shoe interface will be included in two poster presentations at the upcoming Footwear Biomechanics Symposium and the International Society of Biomechanics conference in Kananaskis and Calgary.

I would like to thank the ISEA for awarding me the Student Engagement Award, which helped me fund visiting one of the leading biomechanics research laboratories in the world, and therefore allowed me to improve my research skills tremendously.

International Congress of Snow Sports Trauma and Safety

The ISEA student engagement award enabled me to attend and present at the 23rd International Congress on Snow Sports Trauma and Safety (ISSS) in Squaw Valley, California on 7-13th April 2019. The funds contributed towards travel, accommodation and conference fees.

The conference consisted of a week of talks and discussions from experts in the area of snow sports safety from all over the world, including physicians, orthopaedic surgeons, biomechanics, engineers, epidemiologists, ski patrollers and snow sports manufacturers. This was my first international conference where I had the opportunity to present my work titled ‘Development of a Tissue Simulant to Improve Assessment of Snowboarding Wrist Protectors’. As I am only at the beginning of the second year of my PhD, I delivered my work so far, enabling me to gain valuable feedback from experts in the area, as well as discuss ideas and suggestions of further work, helping me progress with my PhD. It was a great opportunity to discover the different research currently being conducted within snow sports safety, as well as network with researchers who have previously been involved in the work on snowboarding wrist protection.

I look forward to attending a future conference once I am towards the end of my PhD and will be able to deliver some key and final findings; developing a full wrist surrogate, and contributing to knowledge of the protective capabilities of snowboarding wrist protectors.

I am very grateful to the ISEA for helping me fund this trip to my first international conference, it has been a very valuable experience.

An assessment of the knee and the ankle instability when running on uneven surfaces

First of all, as a french student doing an internship in Australia, the funds were directly used as a support help for the flight tickets.

Due to the unknown movements of the ankle and the knee when a person is running on uneven surface like soft and hard sand which cause injuries during beach sport in Australia. This project has the objective to propose some hypotheses and an assessment of the dynamism of ankle and knee.
By sand stiffness study, we were expected to know better the mechanical characteristics of sand and then could explain difference of movement of ankle and knee. At least, we know that hard sand’s stiffness is sixteen times higher than on soft sand. This difference is mainly due to the fact that soft sand is an uncompacted surface.

Then the assessment of dynamism of the ankle and the knee lead to the first conclusion that on impact accelerations are much higher on hard sand than on soft sand with mean acceleration 13% higher in average. This concurs with the sand stiffness research. The second analysis of running data was to study, with statistical parameters, the difference of movement of the ankle and the knee. This lead to the conclusion that movement on x-axis and z-axis are lower on the knee than the ankle. This has been shown by a rise by 64% to 153% of the mean acceleration on x-axis of the knee compare to the ankle but also a more balanced dispersion of accelerations values due to skewness generally closer to 0. On z-axis it’s a decrease of mean accelerations by 35% to 127% and also of variance which indicated less dispersion of accelerations values. This leads to underline that impact accelerations during the running are absorbed by leg’s muscles. However for y-axis, statistical parameters show on the contrary more movement of the knee than the ankle. The last analyse was mitigate due to mixed interpretation which jeopardized no sportiest runners on some axis; as on x-axis. But sometimes jeopardized sportiest runner due to important quick movement of his ankle and knee, as on z-axis. However one analyse could be more important and need to be underline, runner 5 is the runner how risk ore for his ankle and knee due to the fact that he is striking more his heel during impact which increase impact acceleration on every axis.

Development of test methods for palm impact of wrist protectors at MMU

The ISEA Student Engagement Award was used in order to help me subside my MD thesis, titled “Development of test methods for palm impact of wrist protectors” which was developed through a collaboration between the Manchester Metropolitan University and University of Padova. The award helped me cover the living costs and accommodation during my work at MMU and the costs of instrumentation and materials.

This experience was very important both for my personal and professional improvement, and for the results that were achieved.

The collaboration between my university and MMU gave me the chance to come to live in Manchester for a few months, visit the city, meet new people, experience a different lifestyle and taste new food.
During my work I was able to develop new skills: I learned how to use the instrumentation that was needed for the test, I learned how to use new softwares, and to improve my teamwork skills and my communication skills. Most importantly it gave me the opportunity to start a new collaboration between the two universities and to see how teams from different universities and countries work to develop their projects.

The aim of this project was to help the team of sports engineering at MMU to develop new tests and methods to assess the quality of wrist protectors for snowboarding. To do that I worked at MMU to test and compare different impact surfaces, I worked to develop new instrumentation to help measure the pressure distribution over the impact surface and finally, at UNIPD, I developed a new palm surrogate with a biofidelic surface and material.

In order to create the new surrogate, we first tested the hardness of human hands with a durometer and scanned them with a 3D scanner, then we 3D printed the molds and the rigid parts of the surrogate with a 3D printer, the soft parts of the surrogate were made out of a silicone rubber.

Before testing we built a new drop rig (Figure 1), it was instrumented with a load cell, an accelerometer and an high-speed camera.

We tested two different surrogate designs (Figures 2 – 3) both with and without a wrist protector, the results from the test were consistent and quite promising, especially for one of the two designs.

Future work should focus on more tests on the surrogates we developed and to compare the results with low energy in-vivo impact test in order to validate or improve the surrogates. These new surrogates should also be integrated with the new instrumentation that we were developing at MMU in order to have more precise results.

Presenting at the 14th biennial Footwear Biomechanics Symposium 2019

The ISEA Student Engagement Award helped me to present at the 14th biennial Footwear Biomechanics Symposium 2019, which was held in Kananaskis, Canada, on July 28th – July 30th, by partially funding the trip.

This was my first experience at an international conference, where I had the opportunity to deliver a presentation of my first PhD study results. This work allowed me to identify a measurement system to estimate three dimensional ground reaction forces in the field, based on inertial measurement units. The validation results showed an improvement in the ground reaction force estimation compared to current methods, particularly in the horizontal direction. This approach allows the evaluation of shoe-surface interaction on different surfaces at a wide-range of venues; thus, it will be used to undertake the next studies of my PhD, which aims to understand the effects of hybrid football surfaces on player movement and performance.

During the three days of conference, there were many interesting presentations on different topics related to footwear science, such as traction, performance, musculoskeletal loading and injury, comfort, perception, alternative and minimal footwear. In addition to academics from all over the world, the conference had also a large industry presence, with scientists and representatives from many of the top footwear companies, as well as some smaller and emerging ones, representing a great stage to learn more about both academic and industrial research in the footwear biomechanics area. Aside from the academic discussions and presentations, multiple social activities throughout the course of the conference were organised in the amazing environment of the Rocky Mountains, such as a hike, which also featured a bear and some deer.

To conclude, I would like to thank the ISEA for helping me to attend this conference, since presenting and sharing my research with a highly relevant audience was a great experience, which helped my growth as a researcher, and it also represented an amazing opportunity to network and engage with other researcher and footwear companies representatives.

Visit to the University of Calgary and attendance to the Footwear Biomechanics Symposium

Aim of the visit:

To engage with academics from the University of Calgary, in order to gather suggestions and expertise for the upcoming studies of my PhD as well as to present the outcomes of the first studyon the 14th biennial Footwear Biomechanics Symposium in Kananaskis, Canada.

Summary of the visit:

The first part of the trip was oriented at attending the Footwear Biomechanics Symposium in Kananaskis. The three-day conference was highly useful. Some topics of the conference presentations gave ideas on how to capture kinematic data when testing different footwear interventions. Other topics showed the wide array of career paths available in this field.

During the visit I promoted the ISEA, CSER and our research on Twitter through the hashtag fbs2019 and tagged using @CSER_SHU and @Isportsengineer. All the Tweets can be found on my account manupautrejo

In the thematic bloc of “Traction” of the conference, I had the opportunity to present the results of the first study of my PhD titled “Evaluation of the effects of traction on ankle kinematics during a side cut using bfPCA”. I received very positive comments of my research and I’m looking forward to
elaborate further on them on a full-length paper for the Footwear Science Journal.

At the end of the conference, I had the chance to engage with Dr. Darren Stephanyshyn for theHuman Performance Laboratory of the University of Calgary. Although for ISB conference preparations Dr. Stephanyshyn didn’t had the chance to show me their lab, we had a discussion of different topics, mainly he shared his experiences on implemented footwear based markersets as well as artificial turf on force platforms. The main outcome was that he is willing to aid my PhD by reviewing draft papers and engage with my supervisory team on sharing his viws during meetings.

Overall this experience was highly satisfactory and will enrich my PhD studies with knowledge and connections that will aid to complete my studies. Also this experience opened my eyes to wider industry/academic opportunities available in my field for my future professional life.

I’m highly thankful to the ISEA for the support given and I’m looking forward to continue engaging with the global Sports Engineering scientific community.

Wearables Course Workshop and Other Engagements

The student engagement award allowed me to visit the department of Sports Engineering at the Chemnitz University of Technology. During the trip, the main goal was to learn more about the work being done by the Sports Engineering group in Chemnitz, and to present and gather feedback on my projects . A main topic was the open-source remote wearables course that I co-developed at Simon Fraser University. The visit gave me a chance to present all the resources from this course, and provide the Sports Engineering department with an overview on how to best utilize on these resources for their own courses in Chemnitz. We had a great workshop, where participants also got some hands-on experience of the course.

For myself, I got some great feedback for the course, and for their department, they learned something that might potentially be integrated into their curriculum in one way or another. Additionally, I got to see the various research that they are currently doing in their department. I was particularly interested into their wearable sensor research that they are doing as part of a capstone project called hybrid-societies. Hybrid-societies is a collaboration of multiple departments at the Chemnitz University of Technology. The goal is to use the interaction of humans and machines to create a better life and lifestyle. The Sports Engineering department’s projects are centered around measuring human movements and giving accurate environmental information and feedback to humans. Since my own PhD work is centered around measuring the performance of athletes and providing them with automatic and objective feedback, I was excited about their work. Lastly, I got a chance to see the town Chemnitz and its surroundings, such as the “Sächsische Schweiz”, where we got to go on a hike close to the Czeck border. I hope that the connections that we built during this week can be utilized in future collaborations and projects.