Developing a computational model of human hand kinetics using AVS
CA (United States) Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Mark S. Abramowitz, USDOE · 1996
As part of an ongoing effort to develop a finite element model of the human hand at the Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR), this project extended existing computational tools for analyzing and visualizing hand kinetics. These tools employ a commercial, scientific visualization package called AVS. FORTRAN and C code, originally written by David Giurintano of the Gillis W. Long Hansen`s Disease Center, was ported to a different computing platform, debugged, and documented. Usability features were added and the code was made more modular and readable. When the code is used to visualize bone movement and tendon paths for the thumb, graphical output is consistent with expected results. However, numerical values for forces and moments at the thumb joints do not yet appear to be accurate enough to be included in ISCR`s finite element model. Future work includes debugging the parts of the code that calculate forces and moments and verifying the correctness of these values.