Musculoskeletal model of osseointegrated transfemoral amputees in OpenSim

PLoS One. 2023 Sep 28;18(9):e0288864. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288864. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

This study presents a generic OpenSim musculoskeletal model of people with an osseointegrated unilateral transfemoral amputation wearing a generic prosthesis. The model, which consists of seventy-six musculotendon units and two ideal actuators at the knee and ankle joints of the prosthesis, is tested by designing an optimal control strategy that guarantees the tracking of experimental amputee data during level-ground walking while finding the actuators' torques and minimizing the muscle forces. The model can be made subject-specific and, as such, is able to reproduce the kinematics and dynamics of both healthy and amputee subjects. The model provides a tool to analyze the biomechanics of level-ground walking and to understand the contribution of the muscles and of the prosthesis' actuators. The proposed OpenSim musculoskeletal model is released as support material to this study.

Grants and funding

This work was funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme as a part of the project MyLeg under grant no. 780871. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.