Dr. A. B. Thornton-Trump, Ph.D.Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, University of Manitoba |
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The simulation of upperbody motion dynamics and muscle forces |
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| Many researchers have been taking measurements of human motion in an attempt to correlate body segment motions to one another. Few researchers have addressed the larger problem of synthesizing human motion in an attempt to determine joint moments and muscle forces. The work to be presented is the simulation in three-dimensional space of a human worker doing a simple repetitive task. The purpose of the simulation is to predict moments required at the upper body joints to complete the reptitive task at various speeds and for various workstation geometries. The simulation required that the problem of redundancy and proper joint restraints be overcome. In additon to overcoming the redundancy proplem, methods had to be developed to allow the determination of body segment accelerations, segment masses, segment mass moments of inertia and joint trajectories in space. Individual muscle forces were then determined from the joint moments using three-dimensional vector modeling and assumptions relating to the muscle activation strategy used to control the motion. Results of a full simulation program are presented. |
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Biography Dr. A. B. Thornton-Trump received his undergraduate degree from UBC in Mechanical Engineering. After working in the Research and Development group with Dupont of Canada, he returned to do his Ph. D. at Waterloo. In 1969 he joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Manitoba to work in the area of biomechanics. He has taught graduate courses in biomechanics, stress analysis, and fluid mechanics. His major work has been done in the area of human motion synthesis and analysis. |