Muscle and Contact Contributions to Inverse Dynamic Knee Loads During Gait

Musculoskeletal computer models capable of predicting muscle and joint contact forces accurately during human movement could facilitate the design of improved joint replacements and new clinical treatments for articular cartilage defects or movement-related disorders [1]. A primary challenge to developing such predictions is the non-uniqueness of the calculated muscle forces, often referred to as the “muscle redundancy problem” [2]. Since more muscles act on the skeleton than the number of degrees of freedom in the skeleton, an infinite number of possible muscle force solutions exist.