Musculoskeletale Modellering en Simulatie

Human and animal movement is often smooth, powerful, and graceful. Animal movement is generated through a cascade of nervous, muscular, and skeletal system dynamics. Even the simple tasks of walking and running require the coordination of hundreds of muscles that pull on bones that move our limbs and generate forces on the environment so we can move. When these systems are disrupted through disease and injury, they result in altered biomechanics and potential movement disorders that can be debilitating. In this course you will learn to construct and simulate musculoskeletal models that generate movement and give you deeper insights into the biomechanics of movement. You will learn how to apply models to improve measurements of movement and to predict behavior, thus extracting more insights about human (and animal) biomechanics than from observations alone. We will start with the constituent components of bones, joints, muscles, and tendons and their dynamics, as the building blocks of musculoskeletal systems. You will learn inverse techniques to extract unmeasured quantities, like joint kinematics, work, and power from observations and to use forward dynamic simulations to predict behaviors and answer "what if?" type questions. You will apply these models and techniques to answer a research question of your own formulation in a final project.