Using computed muscle control to generate forward dynamic simulations of human walking from experimental data.
The objective of this study was to develop an efficient methodology for generating muscle-actuated simulations of human walking that closely reproduce experimental measures of kinematics and ground reaction forces. We first introduce a residual elimination algorithm (REA) to compute pelvis and low back kinematic trajectories that ensure consistency between whole-body dynamics and measured ground reactions. We then use a computed muscle control (CMC) algorithm to vary muscle excitations to track experimental joint kinematics within a forward dynamic simulation. CMC explicitly accounts for delays in muscle force production resulting from activation and contraction dynamics while using a general static optimization framework to resolve muscle redundancy. CMC was used to compute muscle excitation patterns that drove a 21-degrees-of-freedom, 92 muscle model to track experimental gait data of 10 healthy young adults. Simulated joint kinematics closely tracked experimental quantities (mean root-mean-squared errors generally less than 1 degrees), and the time histories of muscle activations were similar to electromyographic recordings. A simulation of a half-cycle of gait could be generated using approximately 30 min of computer processing time. The speed and accuracy of REA and CMC make it practical to generate subject-specific simulations of gait.
Thelen
Darryl G
DG
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. thelen@engr.wisc.edu
Anderson
Frank C
FC
D000465:Algorithms; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005684:Gait / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D018482:Muscle, Skeletal / Q000502:physiology*; D000091402:Prohibitins; D012107:Research Design; D014481:United States; D016138:Walking / Q000502:physiology*