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Evaluating knee osteoarthritis is an important issue. Gait pattern has been suggested to be related to the progression of knee osteoarthritis; however, there are only a few studies elucidating the motion features associated with knee osteoarthritis. Therefore, our objective is to analyze the elevation angle of patients with knee osteoarthritis during gait and to clarify the movement features by an approximate plane of the elevation angle. As a result, the same planar law could be applied to patients with knee osteoarthritis as well as to healthy people. The patients have approximate plane slopes that differ from that of healthy people. Our validation results have shown that these angular differences can distinguish between the patients and healthy people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Standing-up motion is an important daily activity. It has been known that humans can employ different strategies to stand up from a chair, but it was not clear how people control their redundant muscles to achieve different strategies. This study employs the concept of muscle synergy which suggests that humans utilize the small number of modules (called muscle synergy) to generate the movements. This study uses two approaches to understand how humans generate different movements. Firstly, measurement experiment was performed to investigate the muscle synergy structure during different strategies. Next, the finding from the measurement experiment is validated through the forward dynamic simulation using our developed neuromusculoskeletal model. Both of our results from simulation study and measurement experiment showed that four muscle synergies could generate standing-up motion. However, they adaptively changed the start time of a certain synergy to achieve different strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recovery of postural adjustment, especially when seated, is important for performing activities of daily living after stroke. However, conventional clinical measures provide little insight into a common strategy for dynamic sitting balance and gait. We aimed to evaluate functional re-organization of posture and ambulatory performance after stroke. The subjects of the study included 5 healthy men and 21 post-stroke patients. The spatiotemporal modular organization of ground reaction forces during a balance task in which the leg on the non-affected side was lifted off the ground while seated was quantified by using complex principal component analysis. A 3% decrease in the temporal strength of the primary module in post-stroke patients was an independent predictor of gait performance in the hospital setting with high sensitivity and specificity. Tuning of the temporal strength was accompanied by the recovery of sitting and ambulation. Our findings suggest that evaluation of the modular characteristics of ground reaction forces during a sitting balance task allows us to predict recovery and functional adaptation through daily physical rehabilitation. • Ground reaction forces were organized modularly during the non-affected leg is off the ground. • The temporal pattern of the primary module is a key factor in recovery of gait performance. • This modular strategy reflects prognosis and type of interventions needed for recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]