Upper limb musculo-skeletal model for biomechanical investigation of elbow flexion movement

Abstract

A biomechanical musculo-skeletal model of upper limb is presented in this paper, which can provide accurate representations of muscles and joints, and capture important interactions between joints. The upper limb model is made up of seven segments: ribs, sternum, clavicle, scapular, humerus, radius and ulna, considered as a single rigid body respectively and includes 22 muscles. The individual muscle forces can be calculated by using an electromyography (EMG) assisted method, which is verified by comparing the simulation results with other researches of an elbow flexion motion. These comparisons show that the muscle forces and the estimated joint moment match well with previous literatures.Estimation of individual muscle forces during human movement opens up the possibility to examine the outcome of muscle deficiencies and to investigate causes of joint instability as encountered in clinical practice. Direct measurement of muscle forces is generally not feasible in a clinical setting, and non-invasive methods based on musculoskeletal modeling should therefore be considered [1] . Various models of the whole or partial upper extremity have been developed over the last decade. These models have been used to study the static effects of muscle action and there are four major approaches including static optimization [2] , dynamic optimization [3] , neural network [4] , and electromyography (EMG) [5][6] assisted method to estimate the individual muscle forces. Using EMG signals as inputs to a musculoskeletal model to estimate the individual muscle forces has recently been used by several groups at different anatomical locations such as elbow [7] , shoulder, knee, ankle, jaw, lower back and wrist. Within the current article, we have combined musculoskeletal model of an upper extremity (clavicle, scapular, humerus, radius, ulna and some upper muscles which are denoted as action lines), movement data and EMG assisted method to estimate the individual muscle forces of the musculoskeletal structure.

A Pilot Study of Individual Muscle Force Prediction during Elbow Flexion and Extension in the Neurorehabilitation Field

“…The other three subjects' muscle force curves are basically in line with the example one. These results of elbow dynamics show great agreement with previous work [10,29]. Through muscle synergy analysis (see Figure 10), we figure out that the scalar products between experimental and adjusted muscle synergy are all above 95% of the four subjects, meaning our method can capture the neural control strategy in spite of some accuracy loss of muscle excitation tracking.…”

“…Muscle force is one of these neuromechanical variables, and it opens up the possibility of examining the outcome of muscle deficiencies and to investigate causes of joint instability as encountered in clinical practice [10]. Given this, we present a neuromusculoskeletal (NMS) model to predict individual muscle force during voluntary elbow flexion and extension by fusion of sEMG and motion data.…”

Stresses in Prosthetic Elbow Joint During Flexion-Extension Movement

“…The finite element analysis (FEA) applied on virtual models is used more and more in the field of research in orthopedics or traumatology as a modern, efficient and accurate method for studying the behavior of human bones and joints . FEA is often used to study the kinematic and dynamic behavior of the human musculoskeletal system, healthy bones, broken and implanted bones [1][2][3][4], as well as normal, osteoarthritic or prosthetic joints of lower limbs [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] and upper limbs [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. FEA allows researchers to test virtual human bones, joints, bone-implants and joints-implants assemblies in order to study their biomechanical behavior or to design new implants and perform their optimization [2-4, 11, 15, 17].…”

Flow Stress Behavior of 2205 Duplex Stainless Steel during Warm Tensile

“…The yield strength of 2205 steel is 2 times that of the 300 series austenitic stainless steel, so it is widely used in petroleum, chemical, chemical tanker, paper making, and marine engineering and other industrial fields [5]. Related performances of 2205 duplex stainless steel such as deformation of welding shrinkage and residual stress, thermal processing performance, welded structure fatigue crack propagation rate, etc, have been researched extensively [6][7][8][9]. As the application conditions of 2205 duplex stainless steel have become increasingly complex, it is necessary to fully study its mechanical properties.…”