2 State of the Art Previous studies indicated that introducing adaptable compliance to dynamic walking is beneficial to modulating walking performance and extending the versatility [1-3]. However, in most of these studies, the stiffness is changed off-line. The transition of different walking patterns in real time was not investigated. Our previous study [4] has demonstrated walking pattern tra...

Environmental, political. and socioeconomic actions over the past several years have resulted in a decreased wood supply at a time when there is an increased demand for forest products. This combination of increased demand and decreased supply has forced more emphasis on engineered wood products, a varied category usually connected with adhesively-bonded end joints, of which the most common typ...

juvenile idiopathic arthritis, Kikuchi's disease and haemophagocytic lym-phohistiocytosis—is there a link? Case report and literature review. SIR, Haigh et al. [1] state that measurement of objective joint stiffness does not relate to that experienced by the patient in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). This premise underlies their paper on phantom limb stiffness in amputees who have RA. However, more ...

This work presents an electrophysiologically and dynamically consistent musculoskeletal model to predict stiffness in the human ankle and knee joints as derived from the joints constituent biological tissues (i.e., the spanning musculotendon units). The modeling method we propose uses electromyography (EMG) recordings from 13 muscle groups to drive forward dynamic simulations of the human leg i...

1. Introduction It is not clear how different portions of the capsuloligaments and muscles contribute to GH stability. Since GH instabilities occur frequently in various shoulder injuries, it is important to understand the restraining forces provided by various structures in the GH-joint. A better understanding of the GH stiffness will also help improve existing shoulder models by including GH ...

BACKGROUND The muscle force-stiffness relationship has often been modeled as linear, while in situ muscle research has clearly demonstrated non-linearity. Estimation of rotational joint stability relies on both a muscle's instantaneous pre-perturbation force and stiffness. Under conditions of static equilibrium, a muscle's stiffness will function in a stabilizing manner, while its force can fun...

Objective: The objective was to estimate the reliability of three stiffness parameters (moment, angle and stiffness coefficient) of the hip extension movement, for three knee positions. Design: Twenty healthy subjects were assessed on two days separated by a one-week interval. A modified Biodex dynamometer was used to move the right lower limb passively in a side-lying position and to record th...

Research effort in the field of variable stiffness actuators is steadily increasing, due to their wide range of possible applications and their advantages. In literature, various control methods have been proposed, solving particular problems in human-robot and robot-environment interaction applications, in which the mechanical compliance introduced by variable stiffness actuators has been show...

Trunk stiffness was measured in healthy human subjects as a function of steady-state preload efforts in different horizontal loading directions. Since muscle stiffness increases with increased muscle activation associated with increasing effort, it is believed that coactivation of muscles helps to stiffen and stabilize the trunk. This paper tested whether increased steady-state preload effort i...