Objectives

The primary goal of the HPNEL facility is to study various brain, muscle, and spinal injuries and disabilities, rehabilitation and therapeutic interventions, and human-centric designs of helmets, prosthetics, implants, robotics, and occupational tasks. Our expertise lies in biomechanics, multiscale brain topological modeling, neuro-engineering, finite element modeling, OpenSim musculoskeletal modeling, neuromuscular fatigue modeling, computer-aided design,  and control theory.

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Approach

Our approach includes both experimental and computational methods to investigate brain and muscle responses to external mechanical loads, with the purpose of creating unprecedented scientific knowledge on multiscale, multiphysics brain injury mechanisms and associated motor impairments.  We first study brain-muscle interaction dynamics for a given biomedical problem and then transform the brain-muscle responses into a mathematically grounded engineering framework.  Our research impacts the convergence of engineering and medicine. 

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• Experimental:  Biomedical experimentations using biodynamic and neurophysiological measurement equipment

• Theoretical: Population-specific mathematical and statistical modeling of neuromuscular responses, brain mechano-electrical responses, and spinal kinematics and kinetics.

• Simulation: Focus on finite element and OpenSim-associated in-silico simulations to understand both mechano-physiological and neural effects in order to derive engineering and therapeutic solutions. 

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Facilities

The HPNEL facility is located at the Reed Labs Engineering Building on the University of Florida (UF) main campus and is part of the Human-Systems Engineering Laboratory (HSEL) of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE).  The HSEL is approximately 2,400 sq. ft. and houses many state-of-the-art facilities (click here), including IMU- and Camera-based motion capture systems, biopotential sensors, a virtual reality system, a 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG), 27-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), 16-channel surface electromyography (EMG), exoskeletons, helmet impact testing setup, helmet roll-off testing setup, eye-tracking system, and force plates. The HPNEL facility also has ANSYS-LSDYNA finite element platform, OpenSim, SolidWorks, AutoDesk, BETA CAE, and Image processing Software such as Mimics 24, 3-Matic, SPM, etc. The HPNEL has an active partnership with the UF's neuroimaging centers to collect CT and MRI scan data to build subject-specific computational models and with the UF's High-Performance Computing Center (HPCC) to develop computational platforms that require high computing power.