Kinematics is not just for our canine colleagues!

We recently welcomed a group of Engineers to use our gait analysis facilities as part of their work on digital technologies and their use in teaching people new skills or helping them with their work. The aim was to compare the effectiveness of video training to motion-capture training shown in a virtual reality environment, and the kinematics equipment allowed this.

Thomas Bohné and his team are interested in exploring new cyber-human technologies and their potential to augment human capabilities. The research team is part of a strategic research agenda at the Department of Engineering's Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) on the future of skills and human work in manufacturing, which is led by Prof Tim Minshall. Over the past 12 months the team has carried out several experiments with technologies such as AR/VR, haptic gloves and Mocap. In a recent research project, the team collaborated with Prof Matthew Allen and his team from the Department of Veterinary Medicine, and Dr Thomas Stone from the Cambridge Clinical Movement Centre. Together they digitised human work movements of an industrial assembly task and used these data to build a virtual reality training simulation. This simulation was then used as part of a pilot experiment to investigate performance differences between groups receiving different trainings.