Using orientation statistics to investigate variations in human kinematics

This paper applies orientation statistics to investigate variations in upper limb posture of human subjects drilling at six different locations on a vertical panel. Some of the drilling locations are kinematically equivalent in that the same posture could be used for these locations. Upper limb posture is measured by recording the co‐ordinates of four markers attached to the subjects hand, forearm, arm and torso. A 3×3 rotation characterizes the relative orientation of one body segment with respect to another. Replicates are available since each subject drilled at the same location five times. Upper limb postures for the six drilling locations are compared by one‐way analysis‐of‐variance tests for rotations. These tests rely on tangent space approximations at the estimated modal rotation of the sample. A parameterization of rotations in terms of unit quaternions simplifies the computations. The analysis detects significant differences in posture between all pairs of drilling locations. The smallest changes, less than 10° at all joints, are obtained for the kinematically equivalent pairs of locations. A short discussion of the biomechanical interpretation of these findings is presented.