SIMM Biomechanics Software Suite

For health care professionals, scientists, engineers, and animators, the SIMM Biomechanics Software Suite is a powerful tool kit that facilitates the construction, modeling, animation, and analysis of 3D musculoskeletal systems. Unlike traditional animation and mechanical CAD packages, the SIMM software suite - SIMM, SIMM/Gait, and the Dynamics Pipeline - is specifically designed to work with systems that consist of bones, muscles, ligaments, and tendons.

SIMM (Software for Interactive Musculoskeletal Modeling) is a graphics-based software package that enables the customer to quickly develop and analyze musculoskeletal models. In SIMM, a musculoskeletal model consists of representations of bones, muscles, ligaments, and other structures. Muscles span the joints and develop force, thus generating moments about the joints.
SIMM enables an analysis of a musculoskeletal model by calculating the joint moments that each muscle can generate at any body position. By manipulating a model using the graphical interface, the customer can quickly explore the effects of changing musculoskeletal geometry and other model parameters on the muscle forces and joint moments.

The Dynamics Pipeline connects SIMM to SD/FAST to simulate the dynamics of rigid-body systems. The Pipeline is a general-purpose software package that enables users to perform forward and inverse dynamics simulations on musculoskeletal models. For forward dynamics, the user specifies the on/off times of
muscles - the Pipeline computes the resulting motions of the body segments. For inverse dynamics, the user specifies the time histories of the joint angles during some activity - the Pipeline calculates the torques required to generate that motion.

SIMM/Gait is SIMM together with the Gait Module option. The Gait Module is an optional component to SIMM that has been developed to visualize results of gait analysis studies. This software is specifically designed to read in files written by movement analysis systems and to create a 3D animation showing body motion, muscle activity, and ground reaction forces. It is used by several
leading motion analysis laboratories to interpret gait analysis data and to communicate results of these studies to others.