RESUMO
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Virtual patients and physiologies allow experimentation, design, and early-stage clinical trials in-silico. Virtual patient technology for human movement systems that encompasses musculoskeleton and its neural control are few and far in between. Our major goal is to create a neuro- musculoskeletal upper limb in-silico model, which is modular in architecture and generates movement as an emergent phenomenon out of a multiscale co-simulation of spinal cord neural control and musculoskeletal dynamics. METHODS: The model is developed on the NEUROiD movement simulation platform that enables a co-simulation of popular neural simulator NEURON and the musculoskeletal simulator OpenSim. We further characterized and demonstrated the use of this model in generating a range of commonly observed upper limb movements by means of a spatio-temporal stimulation pattern delivered to the cervical spinal cord. RESULTS: We were able to characterize the model based on proprioception (Ia, Ib and II fibers), afferent conduction delay and inital postures of the musculoskeletal system. A smooth movement was achieved in all the considered experiments. The generated movements in all degrees of freedom were reproduced in accordance with the previous experimental studies. CONCLUSION: In this work, design and development of the upper limb model was described in a modular fashion, while reusing existing models and modules. We believe this work enables a first and small step towards an in-silico paradigms for understanding upper limb movement, disease pathology, medication, and rehabilitation.