What is the maximum acceleration a human can generate? With which body part?
As I was reading the description on the back of a gaming mouse carton, "50g of acceleration", I was thinking: "A human hand cannot possibly get close to this kind of acceleration!" The ensuing google-search only came up with results as to how much acceleration the human body can withstand, not how much it can produce, so that is why I decided to ask here:
How much acceleration can an average human being generate? (Even if it is just a short burst)
What body part generates the most? How much is it?
How much can the elbow/wrist (whatever is involved in moving a computer mouse) generate?
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As far as I know, the fastest movements and possibly the biggest acceleration are due to eye saccades, that is rapid movements of the eye as it scans the environment. Those are involuntary and have to do with perception.
Wikipedia quotes the speed at 900 degrees/second (2.5 revolutions, for comparison with ADAM). As for acceleration, "Unsupervised clustering method to detect microsaccades" (graph cut-out below) puts peak angular acceleration at cca 7000 degrees/second^2.
My arm is ~84 cm long. Earlier this evening, I timed myself doing arm swings at 20 circles/(10 seconds). That's 2 revs/second. With a 84 cm radius, my fingertips were therefore moving
2*[2*pi*(0.84m)]/sec ~ 10 m/s.
Centripetal acceleration = v^2/radius.
(7.54m/s)^2/(0.6m) ~ 120 m/s^2 ==> 12 G.
My fingertips were being accelerated back to my shoulder at almost 12 G!
Although that seems impossibly high, my fingertips felt like they were going to burst while I was doing it, and 3 hours later, as I type, that hand still feels puffy and slightly bruised - after only 20 seconds of swinging. If my head had felt that kind of pressure I would have passed out, guaranteed.
Well, I got here through the "gaming mouse can endure 50g acceleration. I don't think (and that's an opinion) that humans can produce anything like that through the end of their limbs. Turns out there's a Wikipedia site on on G-Forces en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force#Human_tolerance. Not particularly useful except for two things. One, the Mantis shrimp can produce 10,400 g force with a claw snap. Yea for our team, I would have picked the mantis shrimp for maximum biological acceleration. (Flea acceleration for an entire animal might be a category.) The second point in the article is that a human involved in an Indianapolis Speedway crash survived momentary G forces of 214 Gs. This was deceleration and the article didn't elaborate on how the force was calculated. G forces are determined by the rate at which an object accelerates (or decellerates0 over a given interval of time. A car driver's rate of deceleration might be significantly slower than a car's rate of deceleration because the care is designed to crumple and slow down the driver's rate of deceleration. The article also mentions that a one meter drop of a rigid object onto a hard surface might generate momentary G forces of 1000 Gs. Not exactly relevant to gaming mice but . . .
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