Abstract
Virtual patients and physiologies allow experimentation, design, and early-stage clinical trials in-silico. Virtual patient technology for human movement systems that encompasses musculoskeleton and its neural control are few and far in between. In this work, we present one such neuro-musculoskeletal upper limb in-silico model. This upper limb is both modular in architecture and generates movement as an emergent phenomenon out of a multiscale co-simulation of spinal cord neural control and musculoskeletal dynamics. It is developed on the NEUROiD movement simulation platform that enables a co-simulation of popular neural simulator NEURON and the musculoskeletal simulator OpenSim. In this work, we describe the design and development of the upper limb in a modular fashion, while reusing existing models and modules. We further characterize and demonstrate the use of this model in generating a range of commonly observed movements by means of a spatio temporal stimulation pattern delivered to the cervical spinal cord. We believe this work enables a first and small step towards an in-silico paradigms for understanding upper limb movement, disease pathology, medication, and rehabilitation.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the support by way of grant-in-aid provided by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MEITy-4(11)/2018-ITEA), Government of India.
(email:mohanr{at}iith.ac.in)
(email: bm17resch11002{at}iith.ac.in)