Musculoskeletal modeling and physiological validation

Digital human models are applied in human motion analysis and simulation. They can be applied in rehabilitation, sports science, biomedicine, and so on. The difficulty of validation of models and analysis algorithms constricts their practical usage. In this paper, we show our work on human motion analysis using a whole-body musculoskeletal model and validate the analysis results in terms of physiology. First, we build the detailed musculoskeletal model that represents the kinematics and dynamics characteristics of human body. Optical motion capture, force plates and electromyography(EMG) are used for human motion capture. We estimate the muscle tensions required to generate the captured motion sequence based on an inverse kinematics and dynamics computation and a mathematical optimization. The estimated muscle tensions for locomotion cycles are compared with the tensions computed from the simultaneously measured EMG data and a physiological muscle model. The model and the analysis algorithm are also applied to a neurophysiological phenomenon, the nontrivial preferred direction that is a result of the cosine tuning. Our model and analysis algorithm achieves results that correspond with the experimental physiological data well. The possible applications of our model and algorithm involve rehabilitation, sports science, biomedicine, and robotics, e.g. a controller of an exoskeletal robot for human support.