Bulletin of Applied Mechanics 2(8), 197–203 (2006) 197 Contact stresses in the human hip joint - review Autor: Matej Daniel 1 1 Department of Mechanics, Biomechanics and Mechatronics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, CTU in Prague, Technická 4, 166 07, Praha 6, Česká Republika. <matej.daniel@fs.cvut.cz> Abstract This review gives an overview of various method used to determine hip joint contact stress: from direct measurement using implanted instrumented endoprosthesis to several methods of mathematical modelling. 1 Introduction It was shown that stresses in the biological tissues could play an important role in remodelling the tissues [24, 36]. Also from the clinical point of view, it is well known that the clinical status of the hip is affected not only by the factors which influence the hip joint resultant force but also by the factors which change the stress distribution in the hip joint, i.e., by the radius of the femoral head or the lateral coverage of the femoral head [32, 35, 40]. Therefore, besides the hip joint resultant force we are also interested in the stress distribution in the hip joint. The distribution of the stress on the hip joint articular surface can be determined from the direct measurements or by simple or more sophisticated mathematical models (for summary see Tab. 1). 2 Direct measurement of the contact stress distribution in the hip joint A direct measurements of the intra-articular contact stress in seventeen cadaveric hips were performed by Brown, 1983. Local stresses were sensed by the arrays of 24 compliant miniature pressure transducers inset superficially in the femoral head cartilage. Hodge et al., 1989 measured the hip contact stress distribution after hemiarthroplasty by an implanted prosthesis in one patient. With pressure transducers mounted in the prosthetic head,