Welcome to the Biomechanics Energy Museum! This is a collection of interactive 3D visualizations of biomechanical energy during gait (under construction).
Why is visualizing energy useful? Partly, because it's really pretty. But mostly, noticing joints in the body where (kinetic and gravitational potential) energy is created (through positive mechanical work, ultimately done by the muscles) and destroyed (through negative mechanical work), we can get insights about how the body works. This can help with ideas for designing treatments for gait disorders, or for designing exoskeletons. Here's a short blog post about some of the ideas these energy visualization have inspired for me for exoskeleton designs. I hope it inspires you too!
How does this work? You click on one of the links below, and you'll be taken to a page with a 3D visualization of the body. You can click and drag to rotate the view, and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. There's playback speed in the lower right hand side. The particles each represent a fixed quantum of energy, which is labeled in the top left of the visualization. The particles you see travelling around the body all begin life as red, right after they are created by positive mechanical work at a joint, and then slowly turn blue as they travel through the body, until they are dissipated (as heat) with negative mechanical work at another joint. Bones are color coded according to the energy density in that segment (J/kg). You can also mouse over bones at any time to see how much total kinetic and potential energy is in that bone. There are red spheres at the joints to indicate when potential energy may be being stored (probably in tendons). These are computed on a upper bound estimate, where we assume all negative work that is followed by positive work at a joint is stored as potential (spring) energy, rather than done by muscles.
So without further ado, here are the visualizations (fair warning for mobile users - these use a bunch of data to view):
Note 1: This site is still very much a work in progress! I intend to write documentation about how these visualizations were calculated, and what I see in them. For now, you'll have to satisfy yourself with just playing with the visualizations themselves.
Note 2: I will be at ASB. Hello! Come find me at the conference and say hi! I'm presenting on AddBiomechanics at the workshop on large-scale data sharing on Tuesday.