Measuring Equine Ground Reaction Forces

This paper describes the design and development of an instrumented force shoe which allows measurement of three orthogonal components of ground reaction force during locomotion in horses, and presents preliminary GRF data for consecutive strides at walk and trot. The authors discuss the design constraints and technical difficulties imposed by a solid frame shoe design and as an alternative propose a novel sandwich design which avoids cross coupling between vertical (compression) and horizontal (shear) forces. The authors present GRF data for a horse moving between walk and trot. They believe this is the first time that three orthogonal components of GRF have been presented for successive strides for any terrestial animal during acceleration or deceleration.