3.6.2.4. Exercise: Indexing lists 1#
We measured some spatial parameters of gait using an instrumented walkway. This instrumented walkway stores the longitudinal distance between the origin and each heel strike in a list y, where each element corresponds to one heel strike, as shown in Fig. 3.7.
Fig. 3.7 Foot coordinates obtained via an instrumented walkway.#
We want to calculate the step length, which is the distance between one heel strike and the next one by the opposite foot. For a given participant, we recorded this y list:
# y-coordinates of each heel strike, in meters
y = [0.13, 0.72, 1.29, 1.93, 2.55, 3.12, 3.71, 4.34, 4.95, 5.56]
Write and test this function:
def calculate_step_length(y, step):
"""
Calculate the step length of a given step.
Parameters
----------
y : list[float]
A list of every heel strike's y coordinates for a given recording.
step : int
The index of the step we want to calculate, the first step being 0.
Returns
-------
float
The requested step length.
"""
Show code cell content
def calculate_step_length(y, step):
return y[step + 1] - y[step]
# Test it
print(calculate_step_length(y, 0))
print(calculate_step_length(y, 1))
print(calculate_step_length(y, 2))
0.59
0.5700000000000001
0.6399999999999999