Assessment of the adoption of different OpenSim models in simulating the drop-landing task with knee injury prevention purposes

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of 4 different OpenSim musculoskeletal models. Specifically, we have focused on a motor task that is particularly complex such as the double leg drop. This particular movement requires a wide knee joint range and also implies the development of very high ground reaction forces with all the consequent issues, first of all, the soft tissue artefacts . The final goal of the current project is to quantitatively evaluate the internal forces involved with the ultimate goal to apply the modelling pipeline in the domain of the knee injury prevention. Several biomechanical variables will be evaluated: joint angles, joint moments, muscle forces and ligament forces. The dataset have been acquired at the BiomovLab of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua and involved 10 healthy subjects.