The duality of knee functional axes and foot contact

Estimating the knee functional axis (KFA) is crucial to both correctly implanting a prosthesis and accessing joint kinematics. Researchers have reported on the KFA mainly with regard to manual management of flexion–extension movements performed passively without any voluntary movements. Active touch and movement refers to what is ordinarily called touching—variations in skin stimulation caused by surfaces are altered together by variations in motor activity. This fact is worth noting because it is often neglected that locomotion and its surfaces form an inseparable pair. The objective of this study was to confirm the distinction between touching and being touched. We were particularly interested in measuring the instantaneous axes of the knee (IAK) during locomotion. We propose the invariant structure of the knee as an attempt to distill a kind of higher-order simplification of a knee model relative to the enormous complexities of analytical anatomical objects.