Facets of Control in Human Walking

Abstract

USING eight normal barefoot male subjects, we have studied, for both feet simultaneously, the timing characteristics of the various phases of heel and toe contact with the ground. Two types of experiment were performed for walking on the level, one with speed fixed at 4.5 feet/s while pace frequencies were varied between 1.25 and 4.00 per s; another with speeds of natural walking ranging from 2.0 to 6.7 feet/s. We chose to experiment with barefoot subjects to eliminate the possible influence of different footwear, recognizing that walking characteristics, with and without footwear, would not necessarily be identical. For both natural and forced pace walking we found that averages of the various footswitch phases, when normalized with respect to the average periodic time, remained fairly constant. Also, for natural walking, both pace frequency and step size seem to depend on the square root of the speed.