Week 10 Progress Report

This week, we moved away from our Gantt Chart in the sense of parallelization; we 'went our seperate ways,' with Max focusing on the physical generator and Allen focusing on the analysis of gait motion.

Max created a block diagram to plan the design of the generator. This diagram includes the components that are included in the generator and helps to display a visual plan for the eventual designing and physical construction of the generator. His next step will be to translate these diagrams into 3D models. This will be done using Google SketchUp and the nodes isolated by the block diagrams to render designs of the different components that comprise the generator.

Allen went into more depth on the "Human Walking Analysis, Evacuation and Classification Based on Motion Capture System," which highlighted some key variables that some classmates had mentioned in their review of our presentation last week. Everyone has a unique walk, and it differs from gender and age. Balance is also a vital piece of walking. In terms of previous gait analysis research, most tend to focus on the sagittal (profile view) plane and ignore the traversal plane and frontal view. The researchers created a fourteen-linkage walking model, consisting of nineteen points, fourteen segments and twelve joints. This paper used motion capture technology to take down data, ranging from velocity to in-depty cycle data. After all, a walk is really just a series of periodic movements (for the knee). The data points to highest velocity occurring at the knee, but Allen will be looking to find other papers to compare.

Additionally, this week he began narrowing down choices for a video analysis tool. The idea is for him to record himself walking on a treadmill with some sort of market attached to his knee. The two video analysis programs are Kinivea and Sports Motion, which he'll work with on the same video and evaluate which gives the most comprehensive data.

Week 8 Progress Report

This shortened week served as, essentially, an extension of what we worked on last week. We just recently got our hands on a LED light band, and the goal is to attach it one of our knees and film the motion of walking with the band in a dark room. The idea is to see if there actually is viable kinetic energy there to be extracted and converted into electrical energy. And while that will be apparent to the eye, it will still require some sort of function or program to pull some quantitative data out of that. We are also planning on contacting the people behind the BioMotionLab animation of the walking motion of the human (see last week's post) to enquire the possibility of receiving any numerical data from them. Kinetic energy is defined as .5(m)(v^2), and if mass remains constant when walking, the velocity (directly proportional to kinetic energy) is where we must focus on. Just after school we came across this paper detailing the analysis of human walking provides a table on p. 392 that shows that the knee contained the highest VMo (velocity motion data) of the tested body parts. The paper is clearly quite dense and will require a more thorough evaluation, but it could be useful to us.
We also researched different parts for our project, namely the magnetic neodymium balls. Thankfully they are all very cheap, none costing more than 10 cents a ball. Several sites are: http://neoballs.com/#, https://www.kjmagnetics.com/products.asp?cat=12, http://www.magnet4less.com/index.php?cPath=1_14.

Week 7 Progress Report

To keep in accordance with our Gantt Chart, this week was focused on beginning to research and render different product designs. Initially, we needed to identify where on the human body we could extract the most kinetic energy. On Monday we talked through different options, from the linear motion from walking with a backpack (like the npower Peg) to the swinging motion of an arm. We came across this animation of the human walking motion and analyzed the different areas of the body. We noticed that the knee experiences the greatest change in height out of all of the body parts during walking. This means that the knee has the most potential energy at certain points in its revolution. Based on this information we decided to design a product that utilizes this centripetal force and change of direction in the knee.
We also successfully drew a diagram and decided upon a method which which electricity will be conducted. Our generator will use a arm with a pivot in the middle of the generator with a neodymium magnet connected to the end.