3 Ways to Calculate Center of Mass Position for Biomechanics
Center of Mass is a fundamentally important anatomical and biomechanical variable in studying human movements, but how do we find it?
Last time, we talked about how center of mass can be altered by the configuration of our body, so the trick of finding the point of balance from physics class won't really apply here. But keep that in mind.
Off the top of my head, there are 3 ways to get at the position and trajectory of the center of mass that I can think of, and each comes with it's assumptions and limitations.
The first one is using established segment parameters which is the method we use. There are existing research that have data on the center of mass of each of the body segment as well as how much each body segment weights relative to the total body mass. Therefore, the COM is simply the weighted sum of all of the individual segments.
However, this assumes that the participant of your research are of the similar demographic to those in the initial research data, and the data set I use are for healthy young athletic popoulations.
The second one is the volumetric approach, which uses some way to estimate the volume of the body. Therefore, there is a modelling and assumptions on how the mass within your body is distributed, and as you know, the density of bones, muscles, and fat are all different.
I am less familair with this approach, but there are a fair amount of researchers within the field that uses this method too.
The third method is the newton's laws approach. When you have force data, then Newton's law dictates that the motion of your COM is governed by the forces acting upon it, so once you know the forces acting on your body, you konw where it is going.
However, this requires a starting position for your COM for you to get the full trajectory of your COM, because the equation only tell you about the change in your COM position.
So all in all, there are no perfect way to get at this metric. All we can do is our best, and acknowledging the limitaitons before trying to push the science forward.
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