BoB – biomechanics in MATLAB

Abstract

Biomechanics is a maturing discipline with numeric analysis of kinematic and kinetic data becoming widespread within academic research institutions and commercial organisations. Many engineers and scientists engaged in biomechanical analysis already routinely use MATLAB as it provides an environment that is productive for a broad range of analysis, facilitates rapid code development and provides sophisticated graphical output. Therefore, a biomechanical package which is based within the MATLAB environment will be familiar to many analysts and will inherit much of the analysis capabilities of MATLAB. This paper describes BoB (Biomechanics of Bodies) which is a biomechanical analysis package written in MATLAB M-code, capable of performing inverse dynamics analysis, using optimization methods to solve for muscle force distribution and produces sophisticated graphical image and video output.