Facilities

Most of the Biomechanics Research Lab's human testing is performed in the laboratories in the G.G. Brown Building. Some testing is also carried out at the U-M Medical Center in clinics and in the operating theaters, as well as off-site institutions for the elderly.

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Motion Analysis Equipment: BRL maintains two fully-equipped state-of-the-art motion analysis laboratories supported by hardware and software engineers. It has dual Northern Digital Optotrak® 3020 systems for measuring human movement. Up to 256 small infrared markers may be tracked at rates up to 3kHz, with RMS error in 3D space of less than 1 mm.

CCTV Systems: Two digital videocameras and two Canon L2 Digital video systems (each with telephoto and wide angle lenses) and 10' Bogens tripods are available for recording gross subject motions. A Kodak DC 265 digital still camera is also available.

Myoelectric Measurement Equipment: A 16 channel Noraxon 2000 system and 48 channels of in-house designed custom high-rate, low-noise automatic gain-setting myoelectric measurement equipment are available. Noise levels are typically less than 2uV referred to shorted inputs. A 14 channel backup FM tape recorder is available.

Supported Surface Reaction Measurements: Eight six-component AMTI OR-6 force plates with signal amplifiers for measuring forces.

Other Equipment: Schaevitz 1000 LVDTs, Entran ELW 500N washer load cells, rotary encoders ranging from 1k to 6k lines, Entran linear and angular accelerometers; and power supplies, analog filters, Tektronix analog and TDS 220 digital oscilloscopes, function generators, multi-channel amplifiers, and many other electronics equipment are available.

Machine Shop: The Biomechanics Research Laboratory has a small machine shop, and employs electrical and computer engineers for the design, construction, and development of custom equipment and software. Comprehensive machining, electroncs and photographic services are also avilable from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Computer Hardware and Software: The BRL has one Sun Ultra 10 engineering workstation and 20 Pentium computers for data acquisition and processing connected to its own local area network. The computers are networked to a Hewlett Packard 8100DN Laserjet printer, a number of Laserjet printers, a HP flatbed scanner and a Nikon Slide scanner. Students, staff and researchers have a wide range of software available to them ranging from scientific programs to desktop publishing packages. Eight of the laboratory computers are equipped with National Instruments 12 and 16 bit, 16 channel A/D and several DIO channel boards. Labview, Matlab, and Borland C++ libraries of routines for data analysis are in daily use. Engineering analysis software for analyzing the kinematic and kinetic aspects of human motion is developed in house. Additional software includes XP, EndNote, AutoCAD, SCRC IDEAS, Slide Write Plus, Systat, Adobe Illustrator, PhotoShop, Portfolio, and so on. With these resources, excellent signal processing, data analysis, graphics, simulations, and other applications are able to be done. In addition, the University's central computer system and 5,000 Sun and HP workstations of the Computer Aided Engineering Network CAEN of the College of Engineering are available for use. They offer a variety of services including current high performance workstations and the latest engineering software.

Human Subjects: Human subjects are available through the University's Claude Pepper Older Americans Independence Center (OAIC) - this is because the Laboratory serves as the core Biomechanics laboratory for that center. The OAIC Human Subjects Core currently has nearly 1600 subjects over age 60 years enrolled. A database on the demographics, functional status, medical status, medication usage, and other self-reported health-related information is maintained by this core.


Our old lab: Dave, Murray, Kelly McGlashen, and James


Our old lab: James showing spine testing equipment to a visitor.


Our new lab in transition: Will, Mari, and Martin installing unistrut


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Lab Map

Click on each room for a description/picture

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