Concepts to be Learned 

Concepts To Be Learned 

Our project changed paths and turned into looking at existing data about nordic walking and its effects on health. When we first came to this new direction we had to better define what ‘health’ meant because it’s a broad topic. Thus, we asked our project partner Garrett if there were specific parameters he was interested in. Through our discussion we came to the conclusion of looking at journal articles between the years 2005-2022 that contained these keywords: nordic walking, walking poles, cardiovascular, arthritis, biomechanics, gait, lower extremities force, sensor and pressure. Our peer reviewed articles came from York University’s Omni catalogue, PubMed, Google Scholar and other publicly available peer reviewed journals. We have essentially turned our first part of the project into a literature review to get an understanding of the actual benefits of nordic walking. From the research we’ve gathered we have more knowledge on the methodology of what researchers used to get data from participants using nordic walking poles such as the sensors, biomechanic capturing software and cardiovascular measuring equipment. 

Our next steps to put our plans into action is to combine the knowledge we gathered from the literature review and incorporate it into a nordic walking pole that has the ability to gather the biomechanics of walking with poles such as the form and the cardiovascular measurements when using the pole in a walking situation. We are also looking at what we can do to make our nordic walking pole to be different from existing poles. We aim to find our answer by further analysing our literature review and looking at parameters that weren’t measured and be the first ones to do it.