Modeling and Simulation of Upper Brachial Plexus Injury

This paper presents the first musculoskeletal model and simulation of an upper plexus brachial injury. From this model, it is possible to analyze forces and movement ranges in order to develop a robotic exoskeleton to improve rehabilitation. The software that currently exists for musculoskeletal modeling is varied and most have advanced features for proper analysis and study of motion simulations. While more powerful computer packages are usually expensive, there are other free and open source packages available that offer different tools to perform animations and simulations and obtain forces and moments of inertia. Among them, Musculoskeletal Modeling Software was selected to construct a model of the upper limb, which has 7° of freedom and 10 muscles. These muscles are important for two of the movements simulated in this paper that are part of the postsurgery rehabilitation protocol. We performed different movement animations that are made using the inertial measurement unit to capture real data from movements made by a human being. We also performed the simulation of forces produced in elbow flexion-extension and arm abduction-adduction of a healthy subject and one with an upper brachial plexus injury in a postoperative state to compare the force that is capable of being produced in both cases.