France Independent Research

About two weeks into my internship in Paris, my supervisor gave me a task to conduct an independent study in the lab.  The idea for the experiment is one that the company had been wanting to do for the past year, but never had all the right technology at the same time.  They left it up to me to track down the technology and design the experiment.

Basically, they wanted to observe acceleration patterns in the feet during a normal gait cycle.  While this information is easy to gather through accelerometer technology, it is difficult to analyze the data and synchronize it with a timeline for stages of the gait cycle.

To solve this problem, I synchronized accelerometer technology with force plate technology, from which I could very easily extract precise moments where feet make contact with the floor (called HeelStrike in gait analysis) and moments where feet released contact (ToeOff).  Since it was my experiment, I figured why not use myself as a test subject!  Here is a sample video from one of my experiments:

The results of my experiment turned out extremely well, and I was able to compare my results to other gait acceleration studies--some conducted here at CogNac-G.  On June 12, presented my results to a research group called Le Centre de Mathématiques et de Leurs Applications (CMLA) at l'École Normale Supérieure and became the first teenager to ever conduct and present independent research for CogNac-G.  Since some of the people in the meeting didn't speak French, my presentation was in "Frenglish."