Evaluation of Regression Equations for Medial and Lateral Contact Force From Instrumented Knee Implant Data

The ability to predict medial and lateral contact forces accurately in the knee could be useful for research on neuromuscular coordination, the development of treatments for knee osteoarthritis, and the design of knee replacements with improved durability and functionality. To improve their ability to predict medial and lateral contact forces, researchers have recently developed knee implants capable of measuring four [1] or six [2] in vivo loads applied to the tibia. These implants provide data that is useful for validating in vivo knee load predictions from computational models. A difficulty in using these experimental measurements is translating them into clinically significant measurements, i.e. medial and lateral contact force. A simple and quick method for finding these contact forces from the experimental implant data would be ideal.