Virtual musculoskeletal scenario-testing case-studies

Doctors, dentists, nurses, athletic trainers, occupational therapists and allied health-care professionals are expected to learn the linkage between anatomy, physiology and ultimately functional-performance of muscles i.e. how muscles affect movement or which sets of muscles carry various loads. However the extent of understanding of functional-performance that can be imparted in a didactic-lecture or cadaver-lab setting of a "Gross Anatomy" class is limited. Hence we seek to create the architecture and algorithms for scaffolded interaction with human musculoskeletal simulation models (virtual prototypes) that can make varied "what-if" type analyses and hypothesis-testing possible. This is very pertinent in the context of the target audience of healthcare professionals who may lack prior exposure to such virtual computational scenario testing tools. Providing such access is vital to training of the next generation of health care professionals to leverage ubiquitous computing and the quantitative-paradigm.