2008/07/11 by Vladimir G. Ivancevic, Ivancevic, Vladimir G.
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Medicine · #FOS: Biological sciences #Mechanics and Biomechanics Studies #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) #Shoulder Injury and Treatment #Sports Performance and Training #Tissues and Organs (q-bio.TO) #q-bio.QM #q-bio.TO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0807.1759
13 pages, 1 figure, latex - major corrections
openalex publication_date 2008/07/11 · arxiv created 2009/04/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Prediction and prevention of musculo-skeletal injuries is an important aspect of preventive health science. Using as an example a human knee joint, this paper proposes a new coupled-loading-rate hypothesis, which states that a generic cause of any musculo-skeletal injury is a Euclidean jolt, or SE(3)-jolt, an impulsive loading that hits a joint in several coupled degrees-of-freedom simultaneously. Informally, it is a rate-of-change of joint acceleration in all 6-degrees-of-freedom simultaneously, times the corresponding portion of the body mass. In the case of a human knee, this happens when most of the body mass is on one leg with a semi-flexed knee -- and then, caused by some external shock, the knee suddenly `jerks'; this can happen in running, skiing, sports games (e.g., soccer, rugby) and various crashes/impacts. To show this formally, based on the previously defined covariant force law and its application to traumatic brain injury (Ivancevic, 2008), we formulate the coupled Newton--Euler dynamics of human joint motions and derive from it the corresponding coupled SE(3)-jolt dynamics of the joint in case. The SE(3)-jolt is the main cause of two forms of discontinuous joint injury: (i) mild rotational disclinations and (ii) severe translational dislocations. Both the joint disclinations and dislocations, as caused by the SE(3)-jolt, are described using the Cosserat multipolar viscoelastic continuum joint model. Keywords: musculo-skeletal injury, coupled-loading--rate hypothesis, coupled Newton-Euler dynamics, Euclidean jolt dynamics, joint dislocations and disclinations