Back to School Video: Motion Capture, Equine Biomechanics and the Future of Horse Sports

Qualisys demonstrated its 3D gait analysis system at the International Conference for Equine Locomotion (ICEL) at Stromsholm, Sweden this summer.

It's back to school time in the USA. And it affects all of us. Maybe it's seeing all those three-ring binders in day-glo colors in the stores. Maybe it's the traffic jam around the mall. Maybe it's seeing little kids "learning" how to wait for the school bus.

But "back to school" resonates in each and every one of us, whether we are conscious of it or not. This time of year, our thoughts turn to self-improvement. Taking a class. Getting our lives in order. Clearing out the clutter. Making a plan. Finally learning Photoshop.

Maybe, like New Year's resolutions, the plans fall apart or fade. After all, for most of us it is a case of "back to work", not "back to school".

If you're looking for a secure future in the world of hoofcare and lameness, it is likely to involve some form of gait analysis or motion capture, and it's not too far off the mark to suggest that an understanding of gait and joint mechanics is deficient in most of our resumes.

For instance, Qualisys writes,"The work was made in cooperation with equine researchers attending the conference...We set up a 60 camera system indoors and in the outdoor setting seen here we used 40-something Oqus 3+ cameras."

Yes, you read that correctly: 60 cameras for the indoor test and 40 for outdoors.

Would you have any idea what they would need 60 cameras for, what they were pointed at or what they were trying to capture?

Here's Jens Frederikson, who rode for Sweden in the jumping at the London Olympics, schooling a horse for an audience of mo-cap cameras at the stables at Stromsholm. (Qualisys photo)

A few years ago, radiographs were big, clunky sheets of film that veterinarians kept to themselves. They slid in and out of envelopes, and there was always a worry about dust and dirt and fingerprints.

Today, we take them for granted. They become part of a horse's portfolio and the ability to be at least familiar with them is assumed to be part and parcel of being a horse professional.

A data collection session at the McPhail Center, where the equine biomechanics course is held.

We are coming to a point where the same will be true of a horse's biomechanics portfolio. Maybe our horses won't be lucky enough to have 60 cameras pointed at them at once, but some mo-cap footage from somewhere may follow a young horse far into his performance career. It will be important that any and all video footage of a horse enhance his gaits and movement, not detract from them, and the horse's mo-cap files will be most critical of all.

If you're a horse professional interested in equine biomechanics, the best immersion course offered in the world will be held the first week in October at Michigan State University College of Veterinary Medicine's McPhail Center for Equine Performance.

Dr. Hilary Clayton instructs the course

 Dr. Hilary Clayton presides over a soup-to-nuts assay of equine anatomy, gait and the intersection of the two in the field of study known as equine biomechanics. Students enjoy a casual classroom environment, hands-on access to the joints of horses, and a chance to work in the setting of one of the world's premier laboratories for equine study.

The course is under the auspices of Equinology, which offers courses all over the world for aspiring equine body workers and affiliated professionals. Admission to the course has some prerequisites and requires advance registration.

Your future could begin when you sign up for Equine Biomechanics with Dr. Hilary Clayton.

Normally, this blog is a big advocate of conferences but the buffet-table style of education offered at most conferences with a big selection of speakers and topics can become diluted. After a while, people attend conferences to hear particular speakers or to have their own chosen theories or techniques reinforced or validated by the speakers. They don't go to hear what doesn't fit their agenda.

Sometimes you need to step back from the all-you-can-eat buffet and sit down for a serious meal. You'll find that your return on investment is manyfold, and your palate may be expanded. Horse professionals have few opportunities for continuing professional education that takes them back to the classroom--and back to thinking seriously and critically about their work.

This is one of those opportunities. So if the thought of a new pencil box can still make your pulse quicken, there's a course for you--if you get organized now...and if your pencil box always had a picture of a horse on it.

About the Qualisys video: Most of us are accustomed to horses who trot, rather than pace. Both the trot and the pace are two-beat gaits, meaning that pairs of limbs strike the ground simultaneously. In most simple terms, the trot requires pairs of diagonal limbs (right front-left hind), while the pace requires pairs of limbs on the same side of the horse (right front-right hind) to extend and land simultaneously.

This video shows an Icelandic being set up for a motion capture by Qualisys, and then shows the resulting imagery. The point of the video is that the horse is demonstrating the Icelandic's ability to pace.

Studies utilizing the Pegasus limb phasing system and probably other systems as well were also front and center at ICEL 7. 

To learn more: go back and watch "Equine Biomechanics Integrated with an Icelandic Horse's Disco-Rhythm Hoofbeats by Swiss Researchers" from the University of Zurich vet school, as shown on the blog in January 2011.

Click to instantly order your copy of this beautiful anatomy education reference poster of the inner hoof wall.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.  

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Video: Equine Biomechanics Integrated with an Icelandic Horse's Disco-Rhythm Hoofbeats by Swiss Researchers

Are you awake now?

This video is your wake-up call. It's a fast-cut peek inside the high-tech equine performance testing laboratory at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where kinematic- and kinetic-research are undergoing an exciting fusion under the direction of biomechanics research professor Michael Weishaupt PhD DMV. Where the disco beat came from is anyone's guess!

Are the researchers trying to turn this Icelandic into an Olympian or a racehorse? No, there are no Frankenhorses in biomechanics labs. "The application of knowledge pertaining to sports medicine does not aim to increase the speed of the horse or allow it to jump higher, but to keep the athlete sound, prepare it optimally for a specific event, and to recognize detrimental influences early in order to avoid an untimely end to an athletic career," wrote Dr Weishaupt along with Zurich's esteemed professor of equine surgery, Dr Jorg Auer, in an explanation of the research at Zurich.

To do that, Weishaupt and his colleagues are combining kinetic and kinematic research in the same evaluation system. Two formerly exclusive branches of biomechanics research are now under the hood of the same laboratory testing matrix.

Kinematics is nothing new to Hoofcare + Lameness readers. Kinematics is simply the study of motion. A student of dressage could be said to be an equine kinematics scholar, on some level.  But in the world of clinical evaluation of horses, we have typically talked about kinematics as the two-dimensional recording of a horse's movement in order to gain insight into a horse's stride's length or velocity or frequency, or to determine lameness. It works very nicely to prove or enhance what we think we see with our naked eyes or what the rider thinks he or she feels from the saddle.

For the past five years or so, kinematics in the laboratory has been moving ahead. Three-dimensional gait analysis has been used in research to delve deeper into the horse's movement so that joints can be analyzed for the complex structures that many of them are. A hinge joint like the fetlock might be analyzed in two dimensions, but what about the hock or the spine? And what about the coffin joint, a complex structure with three types of motion patterns--flexion-extension, abduction-adduction and axial rotation?

And what if a specific location in the limb could be isolated, such as the distal end of the cannon bone, where so many racing injuries occur? If the forces there can be measured over different track surfaces, aren't we light years ahead in preventing breakdowns?

When studying the motion of the horse, it's not just about the legs. The neck and head and back are critical components so gait analysis has expanded to putting markers all over the horse. The angular motion patterns (flexion-extension, lateral bending and lateral excursion) of six vertebrae (T10, T13, T17, L1, L3 and L5) and the axial rotation of the pelvis are calculated by the software used in the research--in the case of our friends in Zurich, that would be the Qualisys system.

In this video, provided by Qualisys, researchers used a similar system at the University of Agricultural Science in Uppsala, Sweden; 12 cameras recorded the horse in three dimensions on a sensitized treadmill so that the movement of the head and neck could be studied with each footfall and with the movement of the rider. Notice that the horse's center of gravity is always clearly marked on the screen.

So now the leading research labs may use three or many more cameras and create almost realistic moving horses on computer screens. Wireless technology has also improved the operations in the equine research laboratory.

If kinematics is the study of motion, kinetics is its alter ego, the study of force. Kinematics might not care if you were a ballerina or a gorilla crossing a Broadway stage--you'd just be a pattern of dots for it to interpret. And kinetics wouldn't care how synchronous or straight your limbs worked as you crossed; kinetics would worry instead about what happened when your feet hit the stage. Did you slide? Did you hit with enough force to break through a board? How long did each foot stay on the floor?

Researchers explore kinetics with force plates and, more recently, the alternative of pressure-sensitive materials such as mats and walkways embedded with sensors. In Zurich's case, it is an instrumented (sensor-embedded) treadmill (photo, above), or "TiF": a "Treadmill-integrated Force" measuring system able to record the vertical ground reaction forces of all four limbs simultaneously and report it instantly.

The buzzwords of kinetics are ground reaction force and center of gravity. A foot in water finds little resistance, but a foot usually lands on somewhat solid ground, depending on the nature of the footing. If the surface was rigid and foot was a wine glass, it would shatter, but it's designed to deform and store energy when it meets the ground. How to measure what happens during that meeting is the goal of kinetic research.

So the scientists at the University of Zurich wanted to analyze how the Icelandic horse on the treadmill in the video is moving (kinematics) while intermittently impacting the ground (kinetics) with his hooves. One of the new advantages of hoof-related research is the integration of the kinetic and kinematic tools. As the video screen draws the dotted horse that the cameras see, the pressure sensors simultaneously are recording the data of the impact of each footfall. The integration of these systems is relatively recent.

But there is a third entity going on here. The addition of a saddle and rider will affect the kinematics of the horse and no doubt the kinetics as well. So the researchers are measuring the pressure and movement of the saddle. Last year the same lab studied dressage horses at the collected walk--a deceptively simple gait that is a challenge to many upper level horses--and measured how much and in what direction at what phase of the stride the saddle moved.

Believe it or not, little research on the walk had been done before, and in particular, no one had tested how the rider and saddle might affect the horse's score at the walk. Since racehorses tend to trot, pace or gallop for a living, you will find a deep history of studies on those gaits over the course of equine biomechanics history. Sport horse kinetics and kinematics is a far less investigated field of study.

In the Zurich tests, all the dressage horses' saddles moved in the same directions at the same phases of the strides, and the rider's movement was the same as well.

And what about the hooves? Labs like Zurich have conducted comparative studies of how a horse moves while unshod, shod normally, and shod with rolled toe or "four point" shoes to study the effects of shoeing changes on kinematics and kinetics--in particular, the timing of the phases of the stride. Does a particular shoe cause a horse to keep its foot on the ground longer than another, and might this be associated with an increased potential for injury? 

So now the dressage horses have gone home and the Icelandic horses are being tested. A research project in progress is Kinetics, kinematics and energetics of the tölt: Effects of rider interaction and shoeing manipulations. The tölt is the amazing fast gait of the Icelandic horse; it is their signature show gait, and possibly unique to the breed. Will changing the shoes on an Icelandic horse change its ability to perform the tölt?

Since no one has studied an Icelandic horse with the resources that are available today, no one really knows.

But someone will. And, by extension, the world will know soon after that.

Thanks to BartMedia Designs for this video.

Here's a little video about using similar but more simplified equipment for testing humans. I hope this helps you understand biomechanics research a little better! The concepts mentioned in this blog post are vastly over-simplified but once you understand the basic concepts, it will all start to make sense.

To learn more: BYSTRÖM, A., RHODIN, M., Von PEINEN, K., WEISHAUPT, M. A. and ROEPSTORFF, L. (2010), Kinematics of saddle and rider in high-level dressage horses performing collected walk on a treadmill. Equine Veterinary Journal, 42: 340–345. doi: 10.1111/j.2042-3306.2010.00063.x

Anyone interested in learning more about equine biomechanics would be well-served by attending the Equinology biomechanics course with Dr. Hilary Clayton at the McPhail Equine Performance Center at Michigan State University's College of Veterinary Medicine in the fall of 2012. A combined course in biomechanics and lameness evaluation with Dr. Clayton will be offered in England in March 2011 at Writtle College.

 © Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.
 

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Speed Skater vs. Rough Shod Icelandic Horse: Place Your Bets!

Claudia Pechstein may be in for a surprise on March 8th. The former world champion in speed skating has won five Olympic gold medals, two silver and two bronze...but has she ever skated against a horse wearing studded shoes?

At the European Championship on Ice, which will be held in Berlin, some of the best Icelandic horses in Europe will be tolting at high speed against each other, but there will also be held a very exciting speed duel between Pechstein and a pacing horse.

Pechstein is featured on a video on YouTube skating backwards; she even looks fast that way. I hope they clip those furry Icelandics to cut down on wind resistance. Claudia doesn't seem to have any.

These horse can fly across the ice, it should be a great race! They wear sharp-studded shoes. Not far from here, harness races are held on the frozen lakes in Maine in winter. Those horses allegedly wear shoes with a continuous outside "sharp" rim.

Photos below from the Icehorse event web site.