REFINING OF THE HANAVAN HUMAN BODY MODEL FOR KINEMATICS INVESTIGATION OF ATHLETES' MOTION

The development of technique, application of video cameras produced the necessity of a system for analyzing the motion of athletes increasing their successfulness. Requirements against the analyzing software package: - suitability for analyzing simple video records - easy of handling by minimizing the number of necessary key points - possibility of correcting errors caused by input data - suitability for the determining the centre of gravity and moments of inertia of the body segments - ability to describe the effect of sports instruments - suitability of motion simulation. During the last few years the researchers of the Department of Technical Mechanics of Technical University of Budapest developed the above mentioned software package. This paper presents the applied model with special regard to the geometric modelling of the torso. The model is a refined Hanavan model representing the human body by 16 simple geometric solids determined by the spatial coordinates of 20 key points. The torso is determined by three segments (upper torso - chest; middle torso - stomach; lower torso - hip), modelling by elliptic cylinders which may rotate in space relative to each others. The benefit of this model s the low number of the necessary additional data.