Lower-limb Muscle Force analysis for a Knee Joint Intervention Strategy

Abstract Recently, there is an increased interest in understanding the effects of force intervention strategies, in particular resistive intervention, for lower-limb rehabilitation applications. Notably, the lower-limb has redundant muscles to actuate its available degrees of freedom. Thus any undesired force intervention may result in undesired muscle group activation, thus affecting the rehabilitation outcome. In this context, musculoskeletal modelling software's will help in simulating various rehabilitation modalities and also to decide the level and timing of the force intervention. Accordingly, the current work uses OpenSim, an open-source platform, to conduct lower-limb musculoskeletal simulations to analyze the changes in lower-limb muscle force patterns due to the addition of external passive spring elements at the knee joint, i.e., knee joint intervention. Changes in the muscle force patterns were studied, and how a single joint intervention may affect other joints is discussed. Overall, the work presents the potential of how such analysis benefits in designing rehabilitation paradigms targeting activation of desired muscle groups.