Evaluate Knee Brace

[Hossein Mokhtarzadeh]

Dear all,

I wonder if you could direct me to a procedure or a framework to evaluate e.g. a knee brace effect on joint biomechanics vs. no brace option in OpenSim.

Let's imagine we aim to develop a knee brace but we would like to simulate it properly in advance. I see it this way:

1. A new design in any CAD software e.g. Solidwork
1a. Then one could even use motion analyses of Solidwork or Adam MSC software to get an idea of how the design works if we don't need biomechanics changes.
1b. One could even use FE models and combine the design with e.g. a generic knee model to get some idea of loading and stress/strain, etc

2. But if we aim to move to the interaction between brace and human, we can import STL files into OpenSim and define contact, constrains, etc (not sure how difficult it is) and do either forward or inverse dynamic to get some idea of what is happening to the joints, muscles, etc.

3. One could take it further and export the outcomes of OpenSim to e.g. an FE software (let's say Abaqus) to get some idea of the interactions similar to the step 1b above.

Like any other design problem such a procedure can be repeated to find an optimum solution for the brace. However, my question is that if anyone has done this in their design using OpenSim and whether I see this correctly.

So I am trying to figure this is out: Is there a better way of doing this process to evaluate a knee brace in terms of its biomechanics function using OpenSim?

I appreciate any comments!

Cheers,
Hossein