A computationally efficient method for assessing muscle function during human locomotion

作者：Lin Yi Chung; Kim Hyung Joo; Pandy Marcus G^*

来源：International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 2011, 27(3): 436-449.

DOI：10.1002/cnm.1396

• musculoskeletal
• model
• gait
• simulation
• ground reaction force
• joint acceleration

When a muscle is activated, it contracts, develops force, and, by virtue of a lever arm, exerts a torque about one or more of the joints it spans. Dynamic coupling in a multi-joint system ensures that a muscle can simultaneously accelerate all the joints in the body, even those it does not span. The overall goal of the present study was to develop an accurate and computationally efficient method for quantifying muscle function during human locomotion. Our specific aims were first to assess the accuracy of the method by comparing its results against reference data reported in the literature; and second to demonstrate the application of the method in the study of leg-muscle function in walking and running. The method is based on using a pseudo-inverse to decompose the ground reaction force, enabling each muscle's contribution to the acceleration of any point on the body to be found at each instant of the gait cycle. One of the most appealing features of the pseudo-inverse method is that it can be applied either to data generated from a computer simulation or to measurements obtained from a gait experiment. The pseudo-inverse method is also roughly three orders of magnitude faster than an alternative approach based on perturbation analysis, which is commonly used to assess muscle function in human gait. The results show that the pseudoinverse method is able to accurately reproduce reference data reported for normal walking. Predictions of leg-muscle function in walking and running are also consistent with findings reported previously by others.

• 出版日期2011-3