BIOMECHANIC EVALUATION OF RUNNING PERFORMANCES

Running is the final result of a very complex coordination involving a lot of different anatomo-physiological supports that are jointly provided by the neuro-muscular, the cardio-vascular, the respiratory and the metabolic systems. Given the obvious difficulties of a detailed evaluation of this specific motor-action, a method for synthetic description and analysis of the running performance has been developed. Such a method, presently tested by taking into account the sagittal plane only), is essentially based on the computation of three suitable indexes (namely P2-D, Kv, q) which integrates the information coming from both kinematic and dynamic data. The index P2-D provides a synthesis of the mean power developed by muscles at the main lower limb joints during the ground contact phase. The index Kv depends on the ratio between the previous index P2-D and the mean kinetic energy developed by the whole body during running. The third index q, pointing out an information which is similar to the well known mechanical efficiency, is depending on the ratio between the running cadence and the previously cited index K, The proposed method has been tested by taking into account various subjects who were running at different mean speed. The kinematic and dynamic data which are necessary to implement the computation of the above three indexes have been captured by using opto-electronic motion analyser (Elite system) and a piezoelectric sensed force plate. The aim of this work is to present in detail the adopted mathematical approach and to discuss, on the basis of some preliminary results, the sensitivity of the proposed method

SMASH: A heuristic methodology for designing partially reconfigurable MPSoCs

n/

The autonomic operating system research project - Achievements and future directions

n/

Exact results in planar N=1 superconformal Yang-Mills theory

In the \beta-deformed N=4 supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theory we study the class of operators O_J = Tr(\Phi_i^J \Phi_k), i\neq k and compute their exact anomalous dimensions for N,J\to\infty. This leads to a prediction for the masses of the corresponding states in the dual string theory sector. We test the exact formula perturbatively up to two loops. The consistency of the perturbative calculation with the exact result indicates that in the planar limit the one--loop condition g^2=h\bar{h} for superconformal invariance is indeed sufficient to insure the {\em exact} superconformal invariance of the theory. We present a direct proof of this point in perturbation theory. The O_J sector of this theory shares many similarities with the BMN sector of the N=4 theory in the large R--charge limit.Comment: LaTex, 14 pages, 3 figures; v2: minor corrections and one reference adde

A RELATIONAL DATA BASE FOR QUANTITATIVE BIOMECHANICAL DATA ANALYSIS

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