Simulação de movimentos para o membro superior humano baseado nas forças aplicadas pelos músculos

Abstract

The computational modelling and simulation of the motion and gait of human beings have been employed for many years in medicine and physiotherapy in several aspects such as, aid in surgeries, amputee treatments, as well as in many other activities performed by professionals of the health area. However, most of the systems based on this technology do not present the main characteristics to prosthesis training, for example, the simulation of limb motion responding to forces applied by the muscles. Therefore, this work has the objective of investigating computational techniques that e±ciently support the simulations cited above, and also to provide an intuitive interface for manipulation of the necessary parameters in this type of system to the health professional and Biomedical engineering. A study of biomechanics principles is presented emphasizing the muscles, joints and bones (considered in this work as a generic class library) related to the human upper limb motion, associated to the necessary equations of the static equilibrium analysis for the human body. Besides, it is presented a study on the main modelling and simulation systems of the human body limbs available in the scientific area. Considering these studies, it has been defined the limitations of the existing systems in terms of simulation by runtime muscle forces and then, to consider a system that allows to the musculoskeletal modelling and the simulation of upper limb motion answering the changes of the forces values applied by the muscles in execution time of the motion. In order to provide an interface with high level of interaction, Virtual Reality techniques had been investigated in the development of the system. The necessary parameters for the motion simulation are obtained by objects of interface or from a file that contains values of forces applied by the muscles in known time interval. After a set of experiments, it was observed that the system allows the changing of value of applied forces by muscles during the motion simulation as well as user interaction with human upper limb model, being able to evaluate from di®erent points of view, the e®ect of applied forces by muscles of the modelled limb.