ABSTRACT
Although swimming is known to be an ideal sport for physical fitness, people have to “master” it at first. There seems to be a lot of people who are reluctant to swim since they cannot swim well. The objectives of this study were to propose a swimsuit for those people with buoyant material to assist the body floating, and to examine the effect of the buoyant material on swimming theoretically and experimentally. The swimsuit has the plate-type buoyant material with several millimeter thickness inside the cloth. Although similar swimsuits have already come onto the market, its theoretical and experimental investigations have not been reported. For the theoretical investigation in this study, our developed swimming human simulation model SWUM (SWimming hUman Model) (Nakashima et al., 2007) was employed. SWUM was designed to solve the absolute movement of the whole human body by its equations of motion, giving the inputs of the human body geometry (shape and density of 21 body segments) and the joint motion.
