Informing Musculoskeletal Models With Xsens

Enabling next level biomechanics

The measurement of individual muscle forces, ligament forces and internal joint contact forces is essential to understand the mechanical mechanisms of human movement. However, such quantities cannot be measured without invasive methods, which has led to the development of computational musculoskeletal models. These musculoskeletal models have allowed researchers to estimate parameters difficult to measure non-invasively and investigate a wide variety of topics. Musculoskeletal analysis provides valuable information into understanding the way the bodies tissues are loaded during human movement. With the emergence of musculoskeletal modelling softwares such as OpenSim, Anybody Technology and Biomechanics of Bodies (BoB), musculoskeletal analysis has become widely adopted in the biomechanics community. However, in the past the use of these models have been limited to the laboratory setting. Inertial motion capture allows the measurement of motion outside of the laboratory and may be used to inform musculoskeletal models in ambulatory settings.

Xsens and AnyBody technologies

The Anybody modeling system allows the simulation of the human body in concert with its environment. Advanced simulations can be run to calculate individual muscle forces, joint contact forces and moments, metabolism and many other parameters.

Xsens and BoB

‘Biomechanics of Bodies’ – in short: BoB – can analyse internal body loadings, energy expenditure, reaction force, joint contact force and more. However, to round off effective analysis, BoB also requires motion data: Xsens motion data.

The team at Coventry University has adopted Xsens technology, and can now use MVN Analyze to capture instant, clean, accurate motion data. They simply clamp BOB onto Xsens Software and watch it go, almost instantly calculating the internal body loads at work in its research subjects.

Xsens and OpenSim

OpenSim is a powerful, freely available and open-source software for modeling, simulating and analyzing the musculoskeletal system.

OpenSim is developed and maintained by Simtk.org, which serves as a public repository for data, anatomical models and computational tools. Following inverse dynamic analysis, individual muscle forces, joint contact forces and moments are able to be extracted from these models. In addition to this, OpenSim can also be used to run calibrated EMG-informed neuromusculoskeletal models (CEINMS), which uses experimental EMG’s to represent muscle activations in the model.
Currently many projects are in place to use inertial measurement units to inform the kinematics of OpenSim models.

Interested in predicting kinetics using musculoskeletal modeling and inertial motion capture?
Read the paper
Or interested in the estimation of ground reaction forces and moments during Gaits using only inertial motion capture?
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