Clinical Validation of Estimated Muscle Activations during Phases of Elderly Gait

Abstract

This study validated muscle activation estimations generated by OpenSim during the gait of elderly fallers. Ten healthy elderly participants walked on an instrumented treadmill, monitored by motion capture, force platforms, and 12 surface EMG sensors. Static optimization was used to calculate muscle activations, evaluated through cosine similarity, comparing them with EMG signals from 12 muscles of the right leg. Findings revealed varied similarity levels across muscles and gait phases. During stance phase, tibialis anterior (TIBA), peroneus longus (PERL), soleus (SOL), gastrocnemius lateralis (GASL), semitendinosus (SEMI), tensor fasciae latae (TFL), and rectus femoris (RECF) demonstrated poor similarity (cosim < 0.6), while gluteus medius (GMED), biceps femoris long head (BFLH), and vastus lateralis (VL) exhibited moderate similarity (0.6 ≤ cosim ≤ 0.8), and gluteus maximus (GMAX) and vastus medialis (VASM) displayed high similarity (cosim > 0.8). During the swing phase, only SOL demonstrated inadequate similarity, while GASL, GMAX, GMED, BFLH, SEMI, TFL, RECF, and VASL exhibited moderate similarity, and TIBA, PERL, and VASM showed high similarity. Comparing the different 10% intervals of the gait cycle generally produced more favorable similarity results. For most of the muscles and intervals, good agreement was found. Moderate agreement was estimated in the cases of TIBA (0–10%), PERL (60–70%), GASL (60–70%), TFL (10–20%), RECF (0–10%, 80–100%), and GMED (50–60%). Bad agreement was found in the cases of SOL (60–70%), GASL (0–10%), and TFL (0–10%). In conclusion, the study’s validation outcomes were acceptable in most cases, underlining the potential for user-friendly musculoskeletal modeling routines to study muscle output during elderly gait.