Dynamic musculoskeletal models of human locomotion: Perspectives on model formulation and control

Abstract

This chapter describes how dynamic musculoskeletal models of human gait can be formulated and used to better understand the causal relationship between applied muscular forces, or joint moments, and the body-segmental motions that result. We have chosen here to focus upon the particular problem of synthesizing gait with models rather than the reverse process, which seeks to uncover the joint moments or muscular forces that created a previously-observed motion. Synthesizing movements from force or torque inputs is consistent with the natural “flow” of events by which movements are produced in a living organism, which proceeds outward from the nervous system to the muscular system, and the mus..