A digital spiked shoes for triaxial force measurement using trigone frustum and PVDF

In the track and field, the gain sprint and hurdles athletes' stride frequency, support time and vacate time, force size and other technical data are important. This study presents digital spiked shoes for measuring the triaxial force between the shoes and the racetrack during the sprint or hurdle. The shoes consists of instrumented spikes, data acquisition circuits and data storage modules. The instrumented spike is a triaxial transducer, which is a cylinder in diameter 26 mm x height 10 mm and a weight of only 14 g and it is designed and fabricated with a novel mechanical structure using the trigone frustum and PVDF. The shoes are tested by a dynamic test equipment to simulate the impact on the foot-ground interface. The preliminary results agree with the theoretical analysis based on the nonlinear model of the dual systems of impact machine. The starting test was done by a healthy subject from starting block and the data show that the spiked shoes can be used for sport analysis. © 2011 Asian Network for Scientific Information.