Abstract
The objective of this paper was to present a method of measuring and identifying dynamics of the patellar tendon reflex. We designed an experimental method to measure reflex dynamics utilizing a body mounted motion measurement sensor and a hand-held instrumented hammer. A simple pendulum model was introduced to estimate the physical parameters including viscoelastic properties of the lower extremities, and to predict the response of knee joint torque on a sagittal plane. System identification was applied assuming a linear continuous time-process model to describe the system input-output relationship. A healthy adult male subject participated in our experiment. The method reliably characterized stretch reflex dynamics with a few simple system parameters of transfer function. It was supposed that the method was simple and feasible to help quantifying clinical manipulations and neuromuscular diagnosis in practical use.
