Book Description
Abstract: There is increasing interest in performing real-time human motion analysis to provide immediate feedback for clinical, sports, and rehabilitation purposes. In this thesis, we present a multibody simulation framework within the Unity environment that can be used for real-time human motion analysis. The framework incorporates musculoskeletal models derived from OpenSim and combines concepts from robotics and biomechanics to derive closed-form definitions for muscle-routing kinematics and kinematic Jacobians. The framework also uses efficient motion decomposition and reconstruction algorithms to track motion in joint space. To demonstrate the performance of the framework, two live-motion simulation experiments were conducted. The first experiment investigated the behavior of the adopted motion reconstruction algorithms by tracking a jogging motion, while the second experiment involved the calculation of the muscular effort values of three different bicep curl forms. In both test simulations, motion tracking and motion analysis were performed simultaneously. For the more computationally expensive second experiment, the simulation update rate averaged to about 105 Hz.