It has been an exciting 2024 for us here at HAS-Motion. Led by our CEO, Scott Selbie, we acquired Visual3D to ensure that it remains a trusted research tool in the biomechanics community. We released our latest application, Sift, designed to complement Visual3D by allowing users to manage and analyse their large biomechanical datasets. And we’ve had the opportunity to introduce ourselves at conferences and user group meetings, big and small.
A Canadian Society for Biomechanics Debut
Now it’s time for our first Canadian Society for Biomechanics conference this week in Edmonton, Alberta. As a Canadian company, it’s great to have such a strong and vibrant national conference. We are excited for the upcoming week and looking forward to engaging with researchers from around the country.
Researching how to shape signals
Building software tools for biomechanical researchers, we think a lot about how biomechanical signals should be prepared for analysis. This preparation is critical for ensuring that researchers can draw meaningful conclusions from their data. Time normalization is a popular pre-processing step that ensures that traces (gait cycles, jumps, swing, etc.) are the same length. But is this sufficient?
Amy Coyle will be presenting results detailing the effects of landmark registration on kinematic waveforms between cyclic and non-cyclic activities. This research is based on two publicly available datasets from Keaton Scherpereel and colleagues and from the Life Environment Research Center Ostrava’s Healthy Aging in Industrial Environments study.
Taking advantage of big data
We’ve been seeing a shit in biomechanics research towards substantially larger data sets. This shift has been enabled by the introduction of new techbnologies, and markerless motion capture technology in particular. The end result of this shift is that researchers can now collect more participants performing more activities in more environments. But are they ready for the subsequent management and analysis?
Scott Selbie will be moderating a symposium highlighting the challenges and opportunities of big data in biomechanics. He will welcome a panel of researchers from academia and industry who are collecting, managing, and analysing large datasets today.
- Kyle Wasserberger (Driveline Baseball). Kyle is currently the Principal Sport Scientist at Driveline Baseball, a data-driven athlete training facility focusing on baseball athletes. His responsibilities include building and maintaining Driveline’s internal biomechanics processing pipelines. He also collaborates with trainers, athletes, and other R&D members on how best to present biomechanics data to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Jereme Outerleys (Queen’s University). Jereme is currently a PhD candidate in the Human Mobility Reseach lab at Queen’s University, supervised by Kevin Deluzio. Jereme’s PhD revolves around leveraging markerless motion capture to overcome historical barriers for clinical integration of biomechanics and generation of large datasets. Jereme also works part time with Theia Markerless, across their biomechanics, support, and development teams supporting both internal and external projects.
- Richard Moulton (HAS-Motion). Richard is currently the President at HAS-Motion. At one end of the spectrum he is responsible for HAS-Motion’s basic research concerning anomaly detection for biomechanical waveforms. At the other end he guides the development of software applications for managing, curating, and analyzing large biomechanical data sets.
Exhibiting Visual3D and Sift
You can also catch the HAS-Motion team in the Exhibitor’s Hall – Booth 108 – all conference long. We’ll be happy to share the latest news for both Visual3D and Sift.
This year’s major features for Visual3D include:
- A JOINT_QUATERNION model-based item for researchers collecting motion capture data using IMU sensors;
- Improved support for reading in the MVNX file format; and
- Automatic model-builder updates for the 2024 release of Theia3D.
Sift’s recent and upcoming features include:
- Anomaly detection techniques for biomechanical waveforms and for principal components;
- A “Normal Database” feature for flexibly summarizing control data sets; and
- Access to Sift’s capabilities as a console application.
Come find us!
Want to learn more about any of these topics? Find the HAS-Motion team everywhere at CSB-SCB 2024. We love to talk about biomechanics!
