Biomechanics: The AnyBody Modeling System

The AnyBody Modeling System is a software system for simulation of human movement. It can model smaller or larger subsets of the musculo-skeletal system (or the entire body) and compute muscle forces, joint reactions, metabolism, mechanical work, efficiency, etc. for given movements. Any property of the AnyBody model is parametric, and the system can be used for optimization of movement patterns, working positions, anthropometric data, boundary conditions etc.

Technically, the system is characterized by the following properties:

It uses an optimization technique to solve the muscle recruitment problem and reverses this by means of other optimization techniques so that forward dynamics problems can also be treated.
It handles static and dynamic models.
Models are fully three-dimensional.
It runs on the MS Windows platform.
It handles very large models on small computers. It is entirely feasible to analyse a model with several hundreds of muscles on an ordinary PC.
Models are developed in the body modeling language AnyScript.

The AnyBody Modeling System is self-contained. It does not build on top of any other platform or require any additional software to be installed.

The AnyBody Modeling System is available from AnyBody Technology with discounted license prices for research and teaching purposes. Price information is available on request.

Applications of AnyBody

AnyBody can be used to investigate a number of fundamental questions as well as to solve practical problems of ergonomics. Typical investigations could be:
What are the benefits of antagonist muscle forces?
Why do we have bi-articular muscles?
How should we design a workplace for a particular repetitive work process?
What are the causes of wrist- elbow- and shoulder pains from working with a computer mouse?
How can we apply functional electrical stimulation of muscles to obtain a desired motion?
What is the ideal anthropometry of a sportsman in a particular discipline?
How can the central nervous system relieve the load on an injured joint, muscle, or ligament, and what consequences does it have for the rest of the musculo-skeletal system?