Estimating Joint Kinematics and Muscles Forces During Robotic Rehabilitation to Detect and Counteract Reduced Ankle Mobility

The paper presents a solution to detect active ankle joint movement while a patient undergoes therapy with a robotic lower limb rehabilitation device that neither restricts nor actively supports ankle dorsi- or plantarflexion. The presented method requires the addition of only two accelerometer sensors to the system as well as a musculoskeletal model of the lower limb. Using forward kinematics and inverse dynamics, it enables knee and ankle joint kinematic tracking in the sagittal plane and muscle force estimation. This is an extension of a previous work in which only hip joint tracking was possible and, thus, muscle force estimation was limited. The correlation results of the current validation study with 12 healthy subjects show high correlation $(R=0.88\pm 0.09)$ between the kinematics estimated with the proposed method and those calculated from a gold standard motion capture setup for all three joints (hip, knee, and ankle). The correlation results of the estimated m. tibialis anterior muscle force against electromyography measurements $(R\ =\ 0.62\pm 0.27)$ are promising and a first application to a patient data set shows potential for future clinical application.