Hip and ankle responses for reactive balance emerge from varying priorities to reduce effort and kinematic excursion: A simulation study

Although standing balance is important in many daily activities, there has been little effort in developing detailed musculoskeletal models and simulations of balance control compared to other whole-body motor activities. Our objective was to develop a musculoskeletal model of human balance that can be used to predict movement patterns in reactive balance control. Similar to prior studies using torque-driven models, we investigated how movement patterns during a reactive balance response are affected by high-level task goals (e.g., reducing center-of-mass movement, maintaining vertical trunk orientation, and minimizing effort). We generated 23 forward dynamics simulations where optimal muscle excitations were found using cost functions with different weights on minimizing these high-level goals. Variations in hip and ankle angles observed experimentally (peak hip flexion=7.9-53.1°, peak dorsiflexion=0.5-4.7°) could be predicted by varying the priority of these high-level goals. More specifically, minimizing center-of-mass motion produced a hip strategy (peak hip flexion and ankle dorsiflexion angles of 45.5° and 2.3°, respectively) and the response shifted towards an ankle strategy as the priority to keep the trunk vertical was increased (peak hip and ankle angles of 13.7° and 8.5°, respectively). We also found that increasing the priority to minimize muscle stress always favors a hip strategy. These results are similar to those from sagittal-plane torque-driven models. Our muscle-actuated model facilitates the investigation of neuromechanical interactions governing reactive balance control to predict muscle activity and movement patterns based on interactions between neuromechanical elements such as spinal reflexes, muscle short-range stiffness, and task-level sensorimotor feedback.