Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Locomotion is absolutely and utterly a commodity in an individual’s life as it allows the ability to move from one place to another. Each individual has their own unique manner of locomotion, their own unique motion of walking, this is known as gait. Although the topic of walking movement may seem simple in the surface, it is actually complex in nature and is the result of combined works of the brain, sensory nerves, muscles and more. This complexity in nature gives rise to the systematic study of human walking movement known as gait analysis. In this thesis, the focus is on gait stability where the objective was to compare the gait stability of a person walking without any external disturbance with a person walking while texting and calling on the phone. To obtain the gait data, the method of motion capture was carried out. It is the process of recording the movements of people which is then stored into a three-dimensional digital data to be processed in a virtual environment. The type of motion capture that was used is that of optical type with passive markers that are placed in specific body parts in the lower extremities. The end result of the motion capture is the knee flexion-extension angle through the sagittal plane. The selected subjects are 20-30 years old males with a “normal” BMI. The experiment procedure contains 5 different phases starting with 2 minute of only walking, followed by 1 minute of walking while texting, then 1 minute of only walking again, followed by 1 minute of walking while calling and finally another minute of only walking. The knee flexion-extension angle is then processed under Recurrence Quantification Analysis and the quantifiers calculated are RR, DET and ENT. RR is a measure of how recurring a set of values are, DET indicates the level of predictability of a periodic signal and ENT indicates the level of complexity of a system’s behavior. After analyzing and statistically testing all 3 quantifiers, it can be concluded that there is a statistically significant difference between a person walking without any external disturbance compared to a person walking while texting and calling on the phone.