The Motion of the Human Center of Mass and its Relationship to Mechanical Impedance

This report concerns the development of a relationship between the human mechanical impedance and the coupling of the human center of mass to the environment. The mechanical impedance is a common analysis tool in biomechanics while the analysis of the coupling of the center of mass to the environment is technically more difficult, if not impossible. The development is based on linear, passive, isotropic theory and shows that the transfer function which expresses the relation between the motion of the center of mass and the motion of the source is similar to a linear second order mechanical system in each of the translational spatial degrees of freedom.