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The understanding of balance and sway remain a continuous field of study for avariety of purposes such as the understanding of what sorts of balance cause falls and injuryto happen, as well as what can be done to prevent this injury. Balance and sway amon

Acceleration is a basic concept in physics and engineering which is widely applied in fluid mechanics and vibration analysis. Recently, research has evolved to create a miniature device capable of measuring three components of acceleration. Electrical engineers have created a device called MinIMU-9 v2 that measures three components of acceleration. The system obtains acceleration components paralleling global (earth) coordinates. MinIMU-9 is designed to connect with an Arduino board (hardware) to maximize its functionality.

Objective The objective for this work was to investigate how the human musculoskeletal system deals with propagation and attenuation of the shock wave initiated at the heel strike. An experiment was designed to evaluate the shock wave on both tibial tuberosities and forehead.

Living cells respond to the outside physical environment by changing their geometry and location. It is crucial to understand the mechanism of cellular activities, such as cellular movement and utilize cellular properties, such as cellular viscoelasticity by both experimental and computational means. A computational model is developed as a tensegrity structure, which not only consists of the cytoskeleton, but also models the cellular nucleus and lamellipodia.

Live cells move in the body in response to physiological and mechanical stimuli. Cells move using lamellipodium which extend beyond the leading edge of the cell. This lamellipodium is part of the cytoskeleton of the cell which pulls the cell forward in cell migration. It is observed that cells will move directionally depending on the stiffness of the substrate the cell comes into contact with. It is hypothesized that cells probe their environment to test the stiffness of their substrate.

Two different cytoskeleton architectures corresponding to the mesenchymal cell and the fibroblast cell, are proposed in this work. They are subsequently modelled by Finite Elements in ANSYS APDL and are tested in two different constraint cases: polarized and unpolarized. Polarization in the context of this work is when the cell disintegrates all its focal adhesions except the ones at the leading edge and the tail edge. The opposite of a polarized cell is defined as an unpolarized cell, which has all the focal adhesions intact.

Mechanical behavior of cells plays a crucial role in response to external stimuli and environment. It is very important to elucidate the mechanisms of cellular activities like spreading and alignment as it would shed light on further biological concepts. A multi-scale computational approach is adopted by modeling the cytoskeleton of cell as a tensegrity structure. The model is based on the complementary force balance between the tension and compression elements, resembling the internal structure of cell cytoskeleton composed of microtubules and actin filaments.

Living cells as physical entities can response the changes of the physiological environment as well as mechanical stimuli occurring in and out of the cell body. It is well documented that cell directional motion is determined by the substrate stiffness. Cells tend to move towards stiffer substrate. Cytoskeleton plays a significant role in intracellular force equilibrium and extracellular force balance between substrate and cell via focal adhesions. Cellular deformations can be evaluated by the use of computational models.