Analysis of damped tissue vibrations in time-frequency space: A wavelet-based approach

There is evidence that vibrations of soft tissue compartments are not appropriately described by a single sinusoidal oscillation for certain types of locomotion such as running or sprinting. This paper discusses a new method to quantify damping of superimposed oscillations using a wavelet-based time-frequency approach. This wavelet-based method was applied to experimental data in order to analyze the decay of the overall power of vibration signals over time. Eight healthy subjects performed sprinting trials on a 30 m runway on a hard surface and a soft surface. Soft tissue vibrations were quantified from the tissue overlaying the muscle belly of the medial gastrocnemius muscle. The new methodology determines damping coefficients with an average error of 2.2% based on a wavelet scaling factor of 0.7. This was sufficient to detect differences in soft tissue compartment damping between the hard and soft surface. On average, the hard surface elicited a 7.02 s−1 lower damping coefficient than the soft surface (p<0.05). A power spectral analysis of the muscular vibrations occurring during sprinting confirmed that vibrations during dynamic movements cannot be represented by a single sinusoidal function. Compared to the traditional sinusoidal approach, this newly developed method can quantify vibration damping for systems with multiple vibration modes that interfere with one another. This new time-frequency analysis may be more appropriate when an acceleration trace does not follow a sinusoidal function, as is the case with multiple forms of human locomotion.