Effects of limited foot placement on specific gait characteristics

Abstract

The study of how people move in crowds must take into consideration two things: the movement of the crowd as a whole and the movement of the person as an individual. Egress and emergency evacuation studies produced results that showed crowd flow rates relative to density and the personal space preferred by most humans. From the other side, biomechanical studies have been performed on human gait to determine relationships between parameters such as velocity, step/stride length, stride frequency/cadence, time of swing and stance, etc.

However, there is little information on how the spatial characteristics of the crowd affect the movement of the individual person within. The purpose of this study is to begin to link the two fields together by discovering the relationship between specific biomechanical characteristics of gait and the distance between people.

The biomechanical characteristics taken into consideration for this study will be maximum velocity, stride length, and stride frequency. Each characteristic will be obtained by use of a motion analysis system and then compared against the buffer zone (the distance ahead of and behind the subject available for foot placement).