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Musculoskeletal models have been widely used for detailed biomechanical analysis to characterise various functional impairments given their ability to estimate movement variables (i.e., muscle forces and joint moment) which cannot be readily measured in vivo. Physics-based computational neuromusculoskeletal models can interpret the dynamic interaction between neural drive to muscles, muscle dynamics, body and joint kinematics and kinetics. Still, such set of solutions suffers from slowness, especially for the complex models, hindering the utility in real-time applications. In recent years, data-driven methods has emerged as a promising alternative due to the benefits in speedy and simple implementation, but they cannot reflect the underlying neuromechanical processes. This paper proposes a physics-informed deep learning framework for musculoskeletal modelling, where physics-based domain knowledge is brought into the data-driven model as soft constraints to penalise/regularise the data-driven model. We use the synchronous muscle forces and joint kinematics prediction from surface electromyogram (sEMG) as the exemplar to illustrate the proposed framework. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed as the deep neural network to implement the proposed framework. At the same time, the physics law between muscle forces and joint kinematics is used the soft constraint. Experimental validations on two groups of data, including one benchmark dataset and one self-collected dataset from six healthy subjects, are performed. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has been widely exploited for simultaneous and proportional myoelectric control due to its capability of deriving informative, representative and transferable features from surface electromyography (sEMG). However, muscle contractions have strong temporal dependencies but conventional CNN can only exploit spatial correlations. Considering that long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) is able to capture long-term and non-linear dynamics of time-series data, in this paper we propose a CNNLSTM hybrid framework to fully explore the temporal-spatial information in sEMG. Firstly, CNN is utilized to extract deep features from sEMG spectrum, then these features are processed via LSTM-based sequence regression to estimate wrist kinematics. Six healthy participants are recruited for the participatory collection and motion analysis under various experimental setups. Estimation results in both intra-session and inter-session evaluations illustrate that CNN-LSTM significantly outperforms CNN and conventional machine learning approaches, particularly when complex wrist movements are activated.