Experimental study of a momentum-based method for identifying the inertia barycentric parameters of a human body

Physical modeling, simulation and analysis of an individual human body require inertia properties of the body segments of the human. Such subject-specific inertia data can be obtained only by measuring the individual human body as opposed to be derived from statistically generated anthropometric database. This paper presents experimental validation of a momentum-based approach for identifying the barycentric parameters of an individual human body which fully describes the inertia properties of the human. The identification algorithm is derived from the impulse–momentum equations of the human body which is assumed to be a multibody system with tree-type topology. Since the impulse–momentum equations are linear in terms of the unknown barycentric parameters, these parameters can be solved from the equations using a least-squares method. The approach does not require measuring or estimating accelerations and joint forces/torques because they do not appear in the impulse–momentum equations, and thus, the resulting identification procedure is less demanding on measurement data than the methods derived from the equations of motion. In this paper the test results of the identification method are validated by comparing the identified inertia parameters against the statistically established anthropometric data. Additionally, the identification results are also confirmed by comparing the contact forces using inverse dynamics to those obtained by forces plates.