For quite a while I’ve had great intentions of releasing some free tools for riders to use at home, but never quite got around to it. As people may have heard (see Nov 1st Horse and Hound) I believe that in order to do full biomechanics you need a serious amount of training. However in terms of running a program and reading out results such as fetlock and hock motion, stride length, symmetry, and rider analysis (is the rider straight, if not how are they crooked), that’s the sort of thing I think riders should be able to do themselves for free and I’d be happy to hand out the software for people to do it. You don’t need any grasp of maths, just a video. The program will tell you there’s more motion in one joint than normal, or less use of one leg than another in a straight-forward, easy-to-understand way.
Provisos:
Not a diagnostic tool. Program can be used for monitoring and alerting to changes but if you are concerned about any results then contact your vet. Tendon and ligament strain calculations will not be included.
Program will not tell you why a rider is crooked (just how they are) or what needs to change. Analysis at the muscular or intra-joint force level and predicting the effect of changes is where you need a clinically trained biomechanist, and some serious computational power. However you are free to attempt to correct asymmetries identified and rerun your program to see if you are improving. Similarly comparing footage at start and end of lessons or at home and in competition can be helpful and very encouraging.
You can have the software for free, you can install it, run it as many times as you like, use it as much or as little as you want, and give it to your friends, but if lots of people ask me for help with interpreting results or to include new features I may charge for my time to do this.
You have to take your own video. It doesn’t need to be great resolution or high-speed (although obviously this helps). You don’t need to attach markers. I use marker-free tracking which avoids all the obvious inaccuracies with attaching a marker to the skin. This means that you literally just need a video and your results will be a lot more accurate than if you used markers, because the positions of the joints are calculated not implied from a marker which may not be applied directly over the point it is meant to represent and in any case moves with the skin and other tissues.
Final proviso, as I said at the beginning I have been meaning to do this for a while (actually about ten years) and I just never get around to it. I want to do it but giving stuff away for free involves protecting code, making nice interfaces, uploading space etc. and so is never quite the crocodile nearest the boat in my to do list. As a result I’m asking people to let me know if they’d be interested. If over 200 people email me (sian@equinemechanics.com) to say that you’re interested I promise to actually release the software, and send it to you first. If people would like to donate £1 or $1 towards the time taken, my Patreon account would love you for it, but donations are not compulsory.
UPDATE: We now have more than our 200 supporters. Many thanks to everyone, sending an email may seem simple, but it has utterly convinced me that this is worth doing. Also many thanks to those who explained their stories and why it would particularly help them. Please do still email if you haven’t registered and would like to be kept informed, but the count is now shut. As everyone who emailed will know I did have to add one more proviso, which was that it is a non-commercial license. You can use it for anything, for yourself or your clients, but you can’t profit from it directly without buying a commercial license. If you and/or your horse are broken, things are tough enough, and there are plenty of services that you’ll have to pay for. Let’s not add anything to that.
You can see all posts related to the Free Software Project here.
