An improved cost function for modeling of muscle activity during running

This paper tries to improve a recently developed mass-spring-damper model of the human body during running. The previous model took the muscle activity into account using a nonlinear controller that tuned the mechanical properties of the soft-tissue package based on two physiological hypotheses, namely “constant-force” and “constant-vibration”. Three cost functions were used, out of which one was based on the constant-force hypothesis and two others were based on the constant-vibration hypothesis. The results of the study showed that the proposed cost functions are only partially successful in capturing the experimentally observed trends of the ground reaction force and vibration. The current paper proposes an improved cost function that combines both above-mentioned hypotheses. It is shown that the improved cost function can capture all the trends that were observed in the measurements of the ground reaction force and vibration level. It is therefore advised to use the new cost function in place of the previous ones.