The purpose of this paper is to develop a more precise damper model of the joint for the quantification of the joint mechanical properties. We modified the linear damper model of a knee joint model to nonlinear one. The normalized RMS errors between the simulated and measured joint angle trajectories during passive pendulum test became smaller with the nonlinear damper model than those of the linear one which indicates the nonlinear damper model is better in precision and accuracy. The error between the experimental and simulated knee joint moment also reduced with the nonlinear damper model. The reduction in both the trajectory error and the moment error was significant at the latter part of the pendulum test where the joint angular velocity was small. The nonlinearity of the damper was significantly greater at thin subject group and this indicates the nonlinearity is a useful index of joint mechanical properties.
