Tender for force measuring treadmill to investigate high-speed running mechanics.

Within the Research Institute of Sports Sciences we are engaged in several research projects that would greatly benefit from the use of a high specification single-belt force-measuring treadmill. These include running footwear developments for both long duration fatiguing and fast running and also prolonged marching and jogging in military boots. The ability to characterise detailed running mechanics over a wide range of controlled running speeds will also be important for projects that involve return to sports participation following injury. Work in this area will require running at near maximal sprinting speeds. Functional testing of running biomechanics is becoming more important in rehabilitation from lower limb injuries in athletes. Return to play or performance criteria established during actual running are now thought to be highly informative from a clinical perspective. This is particularly the case for faster running speeds linked to specific injury mechanisms. Therefore, the requested force-measuring treadmill will provide valuable quantitative medical information to assist athletes in their injury recovery and readiness for the demands of returning to full sports participation. Other important treadmill features required include both an inclined and declined surface functionality (for projects investigating the detrimental effects of muscle soreness) and the ability of the belt to accelerate or decelerate in order to perturb gait (to simulate slipping for example). The latter application will require the treadmill motor to be industrial grade (with very high belt acceleration capabilities). The force data from the treadmill surface to feed into the above applications must have an excellent signal to noise ratio (i.e. relatively noise free raw data) and be able to capture high-frequency aspects of the ground reaction forces during running impacts. This will require the treadmill to have a high natural frequency of vibration to avoid vibration and resonance effects from the impacts. Force data should also have real-time integration capabilities with both our current opto-electronic 3D camera systems from Qualisys (Sweden) and Vicon (U.K.). There also needs to be direct integration with Visual 3D software by C-Motion (which we use in our laboratory) in order to optimise the processing of data. Therefore, this tender is for a high specification force-measuring treadmill. Whilst there is no guarantee of overall spend, the anticipated spend for this specialised apparatus is approximately 80K-100K and may be subject to available funding