The purpose of this paper is to suggest a practical and simple method for the identification of the joint mechanical properties and to apply it to human knee joints. The passive moment at a joint was modeled by three mechanical parts, that is, a gravity term, a linear damper term and a nonlinear spring term. Passive pendulum tests were performed in 5 fat and 5 thin men. The data of pendulum test were used to identify the mechanical properties of joints through sequential quadratic programming (SQP) with random initial values. The identification was successful where the normalized root-mean-squared (RMS) errors between the simulated and experimental joint angle trajectories were less than 10%. The parameter values of mechanical properties obtained in this study agreed with literature. The inertia, gravity and the damping constant were greater at fat men, which indicates more resistance to body movement and more energy consumption for fat men. The suggested method is noninvasive and requires simple setup and short measurement time. It is expected to be useful in the evaluation of joint pathologies.
