Musculoskeletal model sensitivity to stereophotogrammetry skin artefacts

Musculoskeletal models (MSMs), embedding multi-body optimisation algorithms, are used to predict the joint kinematics and the forces transmitted by internal structures for clinical and research purposes. They are typically driven using skin-mounted marker trajectories measured with stereophotogrammetry, which are affected by the artefact movement of the markers relative to the underlying bone (soft tissue artefact: STA). The effects of the STA on the MSM model outputs, however, are still unclear. The aim of this study is to investigate the sensitivity to the STA of the muscle and joint forces estimated by a MSM selected among those implemented in OpenSim.