Revving up Rider Safety: Reducing the Risk of Hindfoot Hyper-Rotation in the MotoGP

REV’IT! would like their first road racing boot on the racetrack before the racing season 2024 for the riders they sponsor in the MotoGP Championship. These riders wear everything REV’IT! from the neck down, except for boots. For boots, they currently have to arrange another sponsor deal with one of the direct competitors of REV’IT!. As contact...

Resting period induces time and mechanical history-dependence in muscle thixotropy around the human ankle joint

Subjectivity, lack of precision, and accuracy are the challenges in the spasticity clinical measurement. One of the causes is the unwell standardization of the measurements that cause temporary changes in muscle resistance termed as muscle thixotropy. This temporary changes can affect the accuracy of the result that may lead to a wrong diagnosis...

Using ultrasound muscle imaging to assess the proportionality between ankle angle and contractile element length: A feasibility study to test the assumption with plane-wave ultrasound and system identification of joint dynamics

Ultrasound gives the opportunity to look at muscles and observe their change in length. This tool has increased the knowledge about muscle-tendon dynamics and sometimes revealed surprising muscle stretch behaviour. System identification experiments use robots to disturb the ankle and measure its torque and angle. Muscle movement is derived from...

A novel ultrasound technique for detection of osteochondral defects in the ankle joint: A parametric and feasibility study

(Osteo)chondral defects (OCDs) in the ankle are currently diagnosed with modalities that are not convenient to use in long-term follow-ups. Ultrasound (US) imaging, which is a cost-effective and non-invasive alternative, has limited ability to discriminate OCDs. We aim to develop a new diagnostic technique based on US wave propagation through...

Differentiation between non-neural and neural contributors to ankle joint stiffness in cerebral palsy

Background Spastic paresis in cerebral palsy (CP) is characterized by increased joint stiffness that may be of neural origin, i.e. improper muscle activation caused by e.g. hyperreflexia or non-neural origin, i.e. altered tissue viscoelastic properties (clinically: “spasticity” vs. “contracture”). Differentiation between these components is hard...