A review on the coordinative structure of human walking and the application of principal component analysis

Walking is a complex task which includes hundreds of muscles, bones and joints working together to deliver smooth movements. With the complexity, walking has been widely investigated in order to identify the pattern of multi-segment movement and reveal the control mechanism. The degree of freedom and dimensional properties provide a view of the coordinative structure during walking, which has been extensively studied by using dimension reduction technique. In this paper, the studies related to the coordinative structure, dimensions detection and pattern reorganization during walking have been reviewed. Principal component analysis, as a popular technique, is widely used in the processing of human movement data. Both the principle and the outcomes of principal component analysis were introduced in this paper. This technique has been reported to successfully reduce the redundancy within the original data, identify the physical meaning represented by the extracted principal components and discriminate the different patterns. The coordinative structure during walking assessed by this technique could provide further information of the body control mechanism and correlate walking pattern with injury.