Using Dynamic Simulations to Investigate Muscle Forces during the Sit to Stand Transfer and Stair Climbing

By: Elena Caruthers

Noon – 1 pm E100

Abstract: While activities of daily living such as rising from a chair or climbing stairs are performed with relative ease by healthy adults, they are considered to be some of the most challenging activities in the home, especially for the elderly and those with lower limb pathologies such as knee osteoarthritis. Current rehabilitation strategies used for these populations are not 100% effective as some patients do not have significant improvements in pain or the ability to rise from a chair or climb stairs. In order to potentially improve and inform targeted intervention programs, the role of individual muscles needs to be investigated further. I will describe the utility of experimental tools such motion capture, which has been used for movies like Avatar, and how they can be used in joint with dynamic simulations to study the behavior of individual muscles, including estimating individual muscle forces produced during a task. I will also discuss the work my collaborators and I did to investigate muscle forces generated when rising from a chair or during stair climbing in a young, healthy population and how these results can be used in the future to help inform current rehabilitation strategies for populations that experience difficulty completing those tasks.

Bio: Elena Caruthers received a B.S. degree in engineering (with a mechanical emphasis) and a B.A. in dance from Hope College in 2012. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree at The Ohio State University in Mechanical Engineering, working for Dr. Robert Siston in the Neuromuscular Biomechanics Laboratory. While at Ohio State, she was awarded the National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in 2013 and was selected to be an instructor for mechanics of materials at Ohio State through the Future Faculty Program in the 2015-16 school year. Her research interests include lower limb muscle function during activities of daily living in healthy and pathological populations as well as engineering education.