The Impact of Movement Skills on Cognitive Skills, Simulating Training Programs, and Markerless Motion Capture

🦾 Biomechanics, Motor Control, and (Re)Training Paper Recommendations

Do our movement skills impact our cognitive skills?

Do our movement skills impact our cognitive skills? Exploring the relationship between cognitive function and fundamental movement skills in primary school children

The literature suggests there is a relationship between motor function and cognitivedevelopment however, few studies have explored the specific role of Functional MovementSkills (FMS) on cognitive function. This research aimed to determine if FMS predictcognitive function, when accounting for con…

Journal of Science and Medicine in SportSearch for articles by this author

Thisi is a really interesting paper at the intersection of biomechanics and cognitive performance in children!

Muscle coordination retraining inspired by musculoskeletal simulations reduces knee contact force

Muscle coordination retraining inspired by musculoskeletal simulations reduces knee contact force - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Muscle coordination retraining inspired by musculoskeletal simulations reduces knee contact force

NatureScott D. Uhlrich

Simulating rehabilitation or training protocols is an interesting frontier for advancing professional practice. This paper provides an example of how researchers have explored these methodologies to inform future training programs.

Constraints on the complete optimization of human motion.

Constraints on the complete optimization of human motion - PubMed

In sport and exercise biomechanics, forward dynamics analyses or simulations have frequently been used in attempts to establish optimal techniques for performance of a wide range of motor activities. However, the accuracy and validity of these simulations is largely dependent on the complexity of th…

PubMedPaul S Glazier

I think it's also important to highlight this classic review paper by Paul Glazier and Keith Davids when becoming exposed to some of the simulation work that's been proposed in the literature.

🤖 Statistics and Machine Learning Paper Recommendations

OpenCap

OpenCap - Musculoskeletal forces from smartphone videos.

OpenCap is an open-source software package developed at Stanford University to quantify the kinematics and dynamics of human movement from smartphone videos.

Musculoskeletal forces from smartphone videos.

A team of researchers created OpenCap at Stanford to democratize 3D markerless motion capture using two iPhones. You can access their preprint paper on bioRxiv, but there are essentially 4-5 steps regarding how OpenCap works:

1. Get 2D video key points from an open-source pose detector on multiple iPhone cameras
2. Create 3D keypoints by triangulating the synchronized 2D keypoints
3. Predict 3D "anatomical" markers using a deep learning model (i.e., creating a marker set that might be used during a marker-based data collection)
4. Compute 3D kinematics using the predicted 3D "anatomical" markers
5. Compute joint kinetics using muscle-driven dynamic simulations

HuMoR

HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation

Davis Rempe

HuMoR provides an impressive solution to computing pose data, especially when joints are occluded (which is typically a big problem with single camera markerless motion capture systems). You can obtain more details in their paper, but this particular video from their website is worth viewing:

The Significance Filter

I think it's always great to learn more about the strengths and limitations of traditional statistical hypothesis testing. This paper titled "The significance filter, the winner's curse and the need to shrink" is another great paper that you should read to understand the statistical testing you are doing with your data.

🎙 Podcast recommendation

I've really enjoyed a lot of the episodes of Freakonomics M.D. during my recent long slow distance runs. Hopefully you find this episode as interesting as I did!

🗣 Quote of the month

"Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself."

- Marcus Aurelius