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 the response of 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. Correlation analysis as an identification method was applied to investigate the system input-output relationship using several measures of the reflex responses to the hammer tapping force in a healthy adult male. Experimental results suggested that the method was simple and feasible to help characterizing neuromuscular dynamics of tendon reflex in practical clinical tests.
