Efficient Human Posing and Morphing for Electromagnetic Analysis

ABSTRACT: As the use of electromagnetic devices has skyrocketed in modern society, so too have concerns about the effects of these devices on the human body. With today"s technology Air Force and other researchers are only able to model the electromagnetic effects on the human body of communications, medicine, security, or military devices in a very limited set of scenarios due to limitations in the data sets and modeling tools. While several detailed 3D voxel models of human internals have been generated, these models are static and cannot be efficiently posed and morphed to model different scenarios. In this paper we propose a physics-based set of software tools based around a fast GPU-accelerated structural solver. The voxels will first be morphed into a new body shape according to specified anthropometric parameters. Then a parametric skeletal model will be extracted from the morphed voxel mesh which can be used to perform the posing in a graphical articulation editor. Displacements of the parametric skeletal model are mapped back to the voxel mesh to provide boundary conditions for the structural solver. By utilizing GPU technology, we expect the run time for these tools to be on the order of minutes. BENEFIT: Efficient and accurate morphing and posing of voxelized anatomical models is valuable to a wide range of users. Human thermal comfort analysts, biomedical scientists, and electromagnetic device manufactures will be able to use these morphable and posable models to predict tissue temperatures for a wide range of the population in any pose. Biomechanical engineers will be able to use these models to predict tissue displacements during motion for any body type. Our software will significantly reduce the computational burden of modifying these voxel models, enabling efficient modeling of RF effects on human bodies undergoing dynamic motion, such as walking, driving a car, or sitting at a desk. It will also enable researchers in many fields to perform these analyses on bodies that have been parametrically scaled to a given height or body mass index (BMI), enabling wider ranges of parametric studies that enable new technologies and advance the state of research in many fields.