Enhancing home-based physical activity for neurodivergent children: adapting the program with AI and universal design.

Purpose: While it is common practice for schools across the United States to include neurodivergent children in physical education classes, many programs outside of school-such as those at home or in the community-are not effectively tailored to meet their support needs. This gap contributes to lower levels of physical activity among neurodivergent children. Our objective was to address this issue by systematically adapting the program to enable neurodivergent children to safely engage in physical activity at home.

Spring-Mass Characteristics in Runners Before and After a 56-km Road Ultramarathon.

Ultramarathons are a unique model to study the effects of systemic fatigue in athletes. This investigation applied the spring-mass template to study runners before and 2 days after a road ultramarathon to characterize the effects of fatigue on systemic gait patterns. Overground kinetics were captured 7 days before and 2 days after the event in 14 runners.

Effect of Strength and Plyometric Training on Kinematics in Female Novice Runners.

Harrison, K, Williams, DSB III, Darter, BJ, Zernicke, RF, Shall, M, and Finucane, S. Effect of strength and plyometric training on kinematics in female novice runners. J Strength Cond Res 38(6): 1048-1055, 2024-Both running performance and injury have been associated with running kinematics.

Assessing spring-mass similarity in elite and recreational runners.

The dynamic complexity and individualization of running biomechanics has challenged the development of objective and comparative gait measures. Here, we present and explore several novel biomechanical metrics for running that are informed by a canonical inter-species gait template-the spring-mass model. The measures assess running mechanics systemically against the template via quantifying characteristics of a runner's kinetics relative to the energy-conserving elastic system-i.

Lower Extremity Inverse Kinematics Results Differ Between Inertial Measurement Unit- and Marker-Derived Gait Data.

In-lab, marker-based gait analyses may not represent real-world gait. Real-world gait analyses may be feasible using inertial measurement units (IMUs) in combination with open-source data processing pipelines (OpenSense). Before using OpenSense to study real-world gait, we must determine whether these methods estimate joint kinematics similarly to traditional marker-based motion capture (MoCap) and differentiate groups with clinically different gait mechanics.