A RELATIONAL DATA BASE FOR QUANTITATIVE BIOMECHANICAL DATA ANALYSIS

Abstract

Multifactorial movement analysis is today extensively adopted, both in sports and in clinical applications. In fact the detection of human movement biomechanical variables is today well supported from a technological point of view, and a number of very sophisticated motion analysers are able to provide a complete set of data for three dimensional representation of any complex motor performance. This can lead to a kind of analyses that would have been considered unthinkable only a few years ago because of the large amount of time required by not automatic systems to obtain the data. In fact nowadays it is not so difficult to acquire data in order to study the variations in the biomechanical performances of a set of athletes after a special training period, or to perform comparisons to study the differences between various classes of athletes. Conversely the problem to face is how to manage the enormous quantity of data available for each subject, and how to perform, taking into account the motor pattern morphology, a statistical analysis that could involve for each variable a point to point comparison between different groups of data. The aim of this paper is to describe a special developed integrated software package including a relational data base manager and a signal processing algorithm for the management of quantitative and detailed statistical comparison among different kinematic and dynamic patterns.