biorbd: A C++, Python and MATLAB library to analyze and simulate the human body biomechanics

Abstract

Biomechanics is at the interface of several fields of science, such as mechanics, human physiology and robotics. Although this transdisciplinarity encourages the emergence of new ideas, the variety of data to analyze simultaneously can be overwhelming. Commonly biomechanical datasets are composed of skin markers trajectories (termed as markers), contact forces, electromyography (EMG) signal, inertial measurement units (IMU) kinematics, etc., which by nature are not straightforward to combine. It is at their meeting point-the body movementthat biorbd steps in; bio standing for biomechanics and rbd for rigid body dynamics. biorbd is a feature-based development library that targets the manipulation of biomechanical data in a comprehensive and accessible manner. For a given musculoskeletal model, it provides functions for inverse flow-i.e., from markers to EMG-and direct flow-i.e., from EMG to markers.