Biomechanics of Injury Expert Witness
What is Biomechanics? – Biomechanics is the science which studies the action of energy and forces on living bodies. Sometimes, the action of external forces generates sufficient internal force which cannot be sustained by the body’s tissues resulting in injury. The injury is the damage caused by physical trauma and the mechanism of injury is the fundamental physical process responsible for the injury.
In the context of musculoskeletal biomechanics, injury mechanisms include:
- Impact
- Dynamic overload
- Crushing
- Skeletal acceleration/deceleration
- Exceeding joint range-of-motion
- Rate & extent of tissue deformation
Each injury mechanism includes some combination of kinematic and kinetic variables. Kinematics variables are the physical factors of time, position, velocity, displacement and acceleration while kinetics variables deal with force. Forces can be developed mechanically or by mass and inertia. Forces or loads are described by magnitude, direction, location, duration, rate, variability, and frequency.
