Kirigami Patch Measures Pitching Palm Motions

Dec-28-19 An elastic kirigami patch able to monitor the palm muscles while throwing a baseball offers new insight into these key motions.

Because the baseball touches the palm muscle while pitching, gathering information using surface electromyography (sEMG) has been extremely difficult, since bulky and rigid electrodes will interfere with the natural motion.
To overcome that obstacle, a team of researchers from Japan created a skin-contact patch using the kirigami folding technique to manipulate a system of stretchable wirings and polymer nanosheet-based bioelectrodes. The flexible patch allowed the team to collect accurate measurements and compare the differences in the activity of the abductor pollicis brevis muscle during curveball and fastball pitches for the first time.

Along with analyzing baseball pitches, the kirigami sensor technology will also open doors to analyzing motion in other areas, such as the sole of the foot, during a wide range of physical movements.

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[NATURE.COM]
[PHYS.ORG]

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