I am trying to include the footwear in the MoCap model. I was wondering what would be a good approach to do so? I was thinking of applying an external force (equivalent to the mass of the footwear) to the center of mass of the foot segment. Does that approach sounds reasonable? Another question I had was how can I incorporate the contact between the force plate and the outside of the footwear and the contact between the inside of the footwear and the foot segment. Any assistance would be helpful.
I need a little more info on what you are trying to accomplish.
Are you interested in knowing something related to the foot or is it higher such as knee related?
Do you plan to model effects of different footwear?
Do you have good data for the footwear forces? all six directions?
If you have good data for the footwear and are interested in something as knee forces, then you could do a "simple" setup with applying the data to a modeled footwear segment.
Otherwise you might look at a much more complex task of modeling the footwear using force dependent kinematics together with the detailed foot model and then it becomes a very large project, even for experienced modellers.
If you are looking for specific help on your project, we also offer project-based or by the hour consultancy and you are very welcome to write me a direct message for a talk on that.
Thank you for your reply. I do not intend to model the effect of different footwear. I will have the same footwear (a generic boot) for all my models. Regarding the region of interest, I am looking for the tibia and the regions above it. So, I assume, a simple setup would be suffice. Regarding the data for the footwear, could you please elaborate on the type of data required? Also, once I have the necessary data of the footwear, how would I move forward? Any assistance would be truly helpful.
Okay, then I think you can just add the mass of the footwear to the foot segment mass to simulate that the model is wearing shoes. That would alleviate the need for recorded data from the footwear, and you can use the GRF prediction tool to estimate GRF.
Thank you for your reply. I just wanted to see which approach should I take if I have the force data of the footwear. We will have the force plate data in our study, but I am assuming that you are referring to the data of the footwear and not the force plate data we obtain during the experimental trials. Could you please clarify more on the footwear data?
Also, you mentioned that "If you have good data for the footwear and are interested in something as knee forces, then you could do a "simple" setup with applying the data to a modeled footwear segment.". Could you elaborate on the "simple" setup as well?
I can include just the footwear mass and the footwear geometry in my model, however, my concern is that when I include the footwear geometry (STL using AnyDrawSTL), I see that the footwear is penetrating the force plate. So, I want to avoid this issue as well.
Other data from the footwear could be pressure soles inside the shoes.
The simple setup would be to add the footwear mass to the foot segment and then perform your analysis.
For visualization you can add the stl of the footwear if you want, you can adjust it in size and location so it wont penetrate the force plates. The stl is primarily for visualization and wont have any effect on the simulation in this setup.