Motor disorders are diseases affecting the muscle function of the human body. A frequently occurring motor disorder affects the lower leg muscles resulting in a pathological gait called foot drop. Patients have a higher risk of stumbling and falling. The most common treatment is the use of a passive ankle-foot-orthosis (AFO). However, the compensation of foot drop is only limited due to the non possible support of all rotational directions of the ankle joint. Therefore, a newly developed concept for a passive AFO is currently in work. To ensure a best possible treatment of the patient, the provided support by the AFO and required support by the patient have to be in accordance. Thus, in this contribution a method is presented that integrates model order reduced finite element analysis for computing the provided support of the AFO and musculoskeletal human models for representing the patients' gait behaviour. With the method, the design of the force generating structures of the AFO can be realized regarding the patients' requirements. The presented method is further evaluated with a specific use case. The main focus lies here in the principal functionality of the method and the provision of valid results.
Exoskeletons, orthoses, exosuits, assisting robots and such devices referred to as wearable assistive devices are devices designed to augment or protect the human body by applying and transmitting force. Due to the problems concerning cost- and time-consuming user tests, in addition to the possibility to test different configurations of a device, the avoidance of a prototype and many more advantages, digital human models become more and more popular for evaluating the effects of wearable assistive devices on humans. The key indicator for the efficiency of assistance is the interface between device and human, consisting mainly of the soft biological tissue. However, the soft biological tissue is mostly missing in digital human models due to their rigid body dynamics. Therefore, this systematic review aims to identify interaction modelling approaches between wearable assistive devices and digital human models and especially to study how the soft biological tissue is considered in the simulation. The review revealed four interaction modelling approaches, which differ in their accuracy to recreate the occurring interactions in reality. Furthermore, within these approaches there are some incorporating the appearing relative motion between device and human body due to the soft biological tissue in the simulation. The influence of the soft biological tissue on the force transmission due to energy absorption on the other side is not considered in any publication yet. Therefore, the development of an approach to integrate the viscoelastic behaviour of soft biological tissue in the digital human models could improve the design of the wearable assistive devices and thus increase its efficiency and efficacy.
During preoperative planning of total hip arthroplasty, the patients' biomechanics is widely reduced to geometrical parameters. To provide the orthopedist more functional biomechanical parameters, a method is shown to model a patient-specific musculoskeletal human model via CT-/MRIimages in OpenSim. Main focus of this contribution is the setup of the passive musculoskeletal system. A generic human model and a segmented dataset of bones from the hip area serve as the basis for the modelling process. During the method the generic model is processed by scaling it to the anthropometry of the patient and adjusting subject-specific kinematics and shapes gathered from the segmented data. Finally, to reach the patientspecific representation the segmented bones are integrated into the model.
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