An integrated package of neuromusculoskeletal modeling tools in Simulink™

An integrated neuromusculoskeletal (NMS) modeling tool has been developed to facilitate the study of the control of movement in humans and animals. Blocks representing the skeletal linkage, sensors, muscles, and neural controllers are developed using separate software tools and integrated in the powerful simulation environment of Simulink (Mathworks Inc., USA). Musculoskeletal Modeling in Simulink (MMS) converts anatomically accurate musculoskeletal models generated by SIMM (Musculographics Inc., USA) into Simulink blocks. It also removes runtime constraints in SIMM, and allows the development of complex musculoskeletal models without writing a line of code. Virtual Muscle builds realistic Simulink models of muscle force production under physiologic and pathologic conditions. A generic muscle spindle model has also been developed to simulate the sensory output of the primary and secondary afferents. Neural control models developed by various Matlab (Mathworks Inc., USA) toolboxes can be integrated easily with these model components to build complete NMS models in an integrated environment.