Force Plates for the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre

OJEU Reference 2019/S 018-037867

Sheffield Hallam University is one of the most progressive and innovative universities in the country. It has an annual turnover exceeding £260 million and employs over 4400 staff. The University has over 30000 students enrolled (including more than 2000 overseas students) across more than six hundred courses. Of these, 24000 are undergraduate students and over 6000 are postgraduates (taught and research).

The University is a Higher Education Corporation as defined under the Education Reform Act 1988, and also enjoys exempt charitable status by virtue of that Act. The University includes all wholly owned subsidiaries of the University, including but not limited to SHULaw.

The equipment required will be used by the Faculty of Health and Wellbeing (HWB) within the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) in Sheffield, which is a £14.8m facility under construction on the Olympic Legacy Park.

Force plates enable the assessment of ground reaction forces in three planes to investigate basic components of human movement capability. Assessment of ground reaction forces and associated derivatives are critical to describe and explain human movement. Direct applications of the use of force plates range from the measurement of force during sprinting in elite athletes, to changes in force as a result of an exercise intervention for patients with diseases that impair basic movement. The force plates are an essential part of the biomechanics infrastructure as they allow the measurement of kinetics (forces between the foot and the ground). In combination with the motion capture system, they allow the inference of joint moments and powers, which are important for assessment of movement in both sporting and healthcare contexts.

The AWRC requires six force plates that can be re-arranged into pits built into the laboratory floor. The primary configuration is 4 adjacent plates in the centre of the laboratory, aligned along their long axes to provide a 3.6m long continuous measurement surface to capture a minimum of two steps during running. Two additional plates will be mounted to the sides of the central 2 plates to allow left and right foot contacts to be captured separately for walking gaits.

There will be two sets of two additional pits located at the edge of the laboratory, to allow additional testing of walking, jumping or static balance whilst the centre of the laboratory is being used for other purposes. A total of 12 pits/beds, 6 force plates and 6 blanking plates are required. The Force Plates are to interface with the AWRC Motion Capture System (Project reference 1819-46-HWB-SAS)