Abstract
The human forearm with elbow joint has two degrees of freedom of motion. Especially it is noticed that the wide range for the rotation of the forearm (pronation-supination) is attained according to the sophisticated complexity of the human forearm with elbow joint. The elucidation of its movement mechanism is useful for the functional evaluation for the medical treatment and application to the welfare devices for the upper limb. The purpose of this study is to develop the arm model that functionally mimics the musculoskeletal system of the human forearm with elbow joint. In this paper, we made a physical model and the computational models, which replicate the bionic function of the forearm with elbow joint. By estimating the moment arms in a physical model, the mobility of the simplified physical model was evaluated. In the three-dimensional computational forearm bone models different in the geometry, the beneficial property of the centroidal lines of the bones was confirmed to extend the range of motion for the pronation-supination.
