Knee Contact Characteristics During Drop Landing Exercise

This work investigates the human leg joint contact characteristics during a drop-landing exercise. The contact characteristics consist of tibio-femoral contact forces and contact point, and hip contact forces. An inverse dynamics 2-D model of human leg is used on this ballistic task in order to simplify computation. Experimental data used show a maximum of 100 degrees of flexion angle and ground reaction forces up to 4 times the body weight. All contact forces show a pattern in which they reach large magnitudes at the beginning of landing, decreasing as the subject end the exercise with a standing position.