Sensitivity analysis of sex- and functional muscle group-specific parameters for a three-compartment-controller model of muscle fatigue.

Abstract

The three-compartment-controller with enhanced recovery (3CC-r) model of fatigue has been validated, in multiple stages and by different methods, for sustained (SIC) and intermittent isometric contractions (IIC). It has also been validated using a common methodology for both contraction types simultaneously to derive sex-specific representative model parameters for each functional muscle group, at the expense of reducing the sample size used to estimate each parameter set. In this study, a sensitivity analysis of the model to both variations in experimental measurements and to variations in the parameter values is carried out to estimate the robustness of the parameter sets. Torque decline prediction error is found to increase only slowly with increasing randomness injected into experimental data, with <1 % increases in error for 8-29 % variation in experimental endurance times. The results demonstrate that the obtained parameters from our previous study are reliable and can be used for fatigue prediction in multiple scenarios without significant loss of accuracy. For all sexes and functional muscle groups examined, the fatigue process dominates recovery in the experimental conditions examined. Finer estimates of the model's recovery parameter will likely require changes to the experiment design in future studies.