Synchronization of Motion Capture and Forceplate Data for Analysis of Vertical Jumping

This paper presents a procedure and Python im-plementation for the offline synchronization of vertical jumping data from a motion capture system and from force plates when a hardware trigger is unavailable and the sampling rates of the systems are known. Experimental data from a total of 15 subjects was collected. The synchronized data is used to evaluate predictions of ground reaction force with a 6-degree-of-freedom rigid-body model of the human skeletal system. The motion capture kinematic data was used as an input to the inverse kinematics and the force plate data was used to evaluate the output of the inverse dynamics of the rigid-body model. The results of the synchronization procedure, the predictions of the ground reaction forces, and an analysis of the joint trajectories are presented. The typical metrics of vertical jumping performance over our dataset were computed and agreed with typical trends and values noted in the literature.