KineBody

During normal startup, your screen should show the following sequence:

I Agree panel

(while the app is loading)

App is ready to use.

A) Drag across the viewing area

• Click on the black background, to deselect any selected bones/joints.
• Click on one of the following buttons, to select the body movement mode.
• rotate around blue &/or green axes
• rotate around green axis
• rotate around blue axis
• translate horizontally &/or vertically
• distance adjustment
• Drag in viewing area, until you reach the desired position.

B) Use the white sliders (Pro version only)

• Hover over the slider - when it turns orange, drag along the slider.

Problem	Cause / Solution
Movements are slow &/or jerky	Low memory Old browser
Colored cursor doesn't appear, when select from movement palette	The cursor won't change until you begin to move it.
Mac only: Body jumps back to previous position, when using full screen.	While viewing full screen, move cursor to very top of screen (so that Mac OS menu bar appears). Then resume regular operations - the jump problem should be gone.

A) Click in the viewing area

• Select a joint by clicking on its distal bone (or bone 'unit').
• Deselect a joint by clicking on the black background.

B) Use the 'Moving joint' menu:

• Select the joint by name from the menu.
• To deselect a joint, select 'None' from the menu.

This section presents some relevant background and limitations related to Selecting a Joint.

• Not all joints are movable
• Bone units
• Associating bones with joints

Not all joints are movable

Of all the anatomical joints that allow movement between bones, not all can be moved in KineBody, for various reaons:

1. Different KineBody editions: Joints within the hand and foot are available in KineBody Pro, but not in KineBody Basic Edition.
2. Low ROM: Joints with low range of motion (ROM) are usually not available, in any KineBody edition. For example, joints within the thorax (i.e., thoracic spine and costo-vertebral joints) are excluded.
3. Combinations & Coupling: Related anatomical joints may be combined, if possible. For example, the proximal & distal radio-ulnar joints (PRU, DRU) are combined into a single radio-ulnar joint in KineBody, because they share a common rotation axis. Similarly, at the knee, the patello-femoral joint is combined with the tibio-femoral joint, as the former doesn't normally operate independently of the latter.

Bone units

Sometimes when you click on one bone to select its associated joint, many of its neighbors also turn blue, and the ‘associated’ joint may be some distance from the bone you clicked. This happens when the bone belongs to a KineBody bone unit: a set of adjacent bones that have no movable KineBody joints between them. Some of the characteristics of KineBody bone units are described in this section.

• Purpose: Bone units are designed to simplify joint selection: you can select a joint via any bone in the unit, but at the same time, you can still identify the individual bones.
• Important bone units: The skull (minus mandible) and thorax (ribs, thoracic vertebrae, & sternum) are formed into units, in all editions of KineBody. Other units are present depending on the Edition; some important examples are:
       KineBody Basic: hand, foot
       KineBody Pro:    central pillar (within hand), midfoot
• How to identify: When you hover over a bone and observe its name in the 'Pointing at' box, its unit name will appear as a prefix, if applicable. For example, 'skull / sphenoid' gives the unit name & then the bone name.

Associating bones with joints

In KineBody, you can select a joint by clicking on a nearby bone. In many cases, you select the joint by clicking on the 'bone you want to move'. This feature presumes a special association between bones and joints, which is described in this section.

For the most part, the bones & joints in KineBody are organized into a well-defined 'family-tree' hierarchy, with the following characteristics:

1. For each joint, there's a single associated bone (or bone unit). Generally, the bone or unit is 'distal' to the joint. Each such joint+bone (or joint+unit) combination can be regarded as an indivisibile unit, when discussing KineBody organization.
2. Each joint+bone (or joint+unit) combination attaches to a 'parent' bone or unit. Conversely, any bone can have one or more 'children'. But, no child has more than one parent. Together, these connections define a tree-like logical structure.
3. All connections emanate outward from the thorax as the single common ancestor or 'root' of the tree.

Because of (a), every joint can be selected by clicking on some bone or unit. As a result of (b) & (c), there's no ambiguity as to which bone goes with which joint: the associated bone, for any joint, is the one farther from the thorax, i.e., distal to the joint.

As the root of the tree, the thorax plays a special role. For one, it's the only bone or unit without a parent, and it has no associated joint. Thus, when you click on the thorax, nothing 'happens': there is no joint to select, no special sliders appear, and the thorax retains its normal bone color. [To clarify the last part: when a bone is colored blue, it means the associated joint is currently selected].

Additional information about the bone-joint hierarchy, including the full list of bone & joint names, is provided here.

A) Drag across the viewing area

1. Select a joint rotation axis, by clicking one of the joint rotation mode buttons ( ). Match the button arrow color to the the rotation axis color.
   
   The cursor will change to match the button you clicked, & its arrow(s) will align with the current axis/axes orientation.


2. Drag along a path indicated by the cursor arrows:

   	drag in the direction indicated by the arrow, for rotation about the same colored axis.
   	drag in an arc, around the joint center (= the point where its rotation axes cross).

B) Use the gray sliders (Pro version only)

• When the slider turns orange, drag along the slider.

Problem	Cause / Solution
Movements are slow &/or jerky	Low memory Old browser
Colored cursor doesn't appear, when select from movement palette	The cursor won't change until you begin to move it.
Can't move joints biaxially (as in the prior editions)	Biaxial joystick for joint rotation has been disabled for KineBody Basic
Mac only: Bone(s) jump back to previous position, when using full screen.	While viewing full screen, move cursor to very top of screen (so that Mac OS menu bar appears). Then resume regular operations - the jump problem should be gone.

This section provides additional information re: operation of some special joints in KineBody.

• Shoulder (sterno-clavicular & acromio-clavicular)
• Neck & lumbar spine (Pro only)

Shoulder joints (sterno-clavicular & acromio-clavicular)

In KineBody, the shoulder has a special property, whereby the scapula is forced to follow the posterior ribs, whenever you move the sterno-clavicular or acromio-clavicular joint. This property requires some special changes to the regular KineBody joint behavior. This is evident if you select the acromio-clavicular joint (by clicking on the scapula): three joint sliders will appear, but only one ('down/upward rotation') is usable, the other two being disabled. Yet, if you move the down/upward rotation slider, you can observe changing values at the other two sliders. In essence, the two disabled sliders are being used to enforce the constraint that makes the scapula follow the ribs. To put it another way, if these sliders were enabled, you could move the scapula unrealistically, away from the ribs, or into the ribs.

A similar situation occurs when you move the sterno-clavicular joint, but it's not readily apparent. In this case, two degrees of freedom (DOFs) for the acromio-clavicular joint are being used to keep the scapula close to the ribs, but the sliders for those DOFs aren't shown.

[Note: the current scapula constraint mechanism can be overridden, to allow full 3 DOF movement, via the Unlimited ROM feature in KineBody Pro / Advanced Option].

Neck & lumbar spine (Pro only)

KineBody Pro allows you to move multiple spine joints with a single control, in the neck or lumbar regions. You can select either of these 'joint groups', by name in the Moving joint menu. Or, to select the neck, click on the skull (group); for the lumbar region, click on the sacrum. Once selected, you can move the joints using the regular methods, i.e., using the gray joint sliders, or by dragging across the viewing area.

Note that when moving these joint groups, the rotation axes (pink, yellow, & cyan) sometimes move more 'freely' than regular/indivdual KineBody joints. That is, for a regular joint, if you try to rotate about any single axis, that axis will remain fixed in space...but if you try the same for the neck or lumbar spine, you can often observe the rotation axis changing its direction in space. This behavior is a side effect of the current joint-group mechanism *. Also note that the axes for these joint groups are rendered using dashed lines; this is done only to indicate that the axes may exhibit irregular behavior (i.e., by design - this is not a bug per se).

You can also select & move indivdual spinal joints, using the regular KineBody methods, with a couple of exceptions: of the neck joints, you can't move the Occiput-C1 joint individually, and the same goes for the L5S1 joint in the lumbar region. The reason is that, within the software, the group joint mechanism 'borrows' some of the regular parts from the individual joints. For instance, the neck uses the slider that would normally actuate the Occiput-C1 joint. Again, this is a limitation of the current joint group mechanism *.

* An improved mechanism which circumvents this effect is planned for future development, and, 'should be ready by Thanksgiving' (in some yet to be determined year).

Multi-purpose Tapping

On touch screens, when you tap in the viewing area, several things can happen: you can 'identify' bones (= view their names), you can select or deselect joints (to set them up for movement), and (in KineBody Pro/ Advanced), you can show or hide bones. You can understand the identifying and selecting behavior most readily via the effect of tapping on a white (uncolored) bone:

• If you tap once on a white bone, it serves to identify the bone, and the bone color changes to orange.
• If you tap twice on a white bone, it serves to select the joint associated with that bone, and the bone color changes to purple.

If the bone isn't white when you tap on it, you’ll get an effect that depends on the current bone color. For instance, if you tap once on an orange bone, you'll select the associated joint. This behavior is consistent with the explantions above: that is, double-tapping on a white bone is just a succession of two single taps: the first to identify the bone, & the second to select the joint.

When you tap in the viewing area, the bones can take on several different colors, to represent their states, as follows:

Color	Bone is identified?	Joint is selected?
white	no	no
orange	YES	no
purple	YES	YES
blue	no	YES

You should be able to understand the meanings of the different bone colors after a short amount of practice. And, if it's not obvious, the purple coloration is intended to suggest a combination of blue & orange, and equivalently, to represent a combination of identified & selected.

To understand what happens in other cases, when you tap on colored bones or alternative bones, or the black background, you only need to understand a few basic principles:

• If you tap on the black background, it will ‘undo’ things: 1st, it will remove any identification, then, it will deselect any joint selection.
• The bone ID & related coloration (i.e. orange or purple) will only change when you tap a new bone, or ‘none’ (by tapping on the black background).
• A selected joint (& assoc bone) remains selected until you select a different joint, or ‘none’ (by tapping on the black background).
• You have to ID a bone, before you can select its associated joint.

There’s one important exception to the rules above: if you tap on a bone that belongs to a ‘bone unit’ (e.g., any skull bone), you can subsequently select the joint for that bone unit, by tapping on any bone within that unit – it doesn’t have to be the identified bone.

A) Drag across the viewing area with 2 fingers

You can translate the body in the horizontal (x), vertical (y), or distance (z) directions, at any time, using intuitive 2-finger gestures, as follows:

• To ‘pan’ the body (= move in the x &/or y directions), drag in the appropriate direction while keeping a fixed distance between the fingers.
• To ‘zoom’ (= move in the z direction), use a pinching gesture, i.e., move your fingers closer together or farther apart.
• You can change the position in all 3 directions during a single gesture, by combining panning & pinching.

[Two finger movements are only defined for body translations. For body rotations, use the techniques in the next paragraphs].

B) Drag across the viewing area using 1 finger

• Tap on the black background, to deselect any selected bones/joints.
• Tap on one of the following buttons, to select the body movement mode .
• rotate around blue &/or green axes
• rotate around green axis
• rotate around blue axis
• translate horizontally &/or vertically
• distance adjustment
• Drag in viewing area, until you reach the desired position.

C) Use the white sliders (Pro version only)

• Drag along the slider.

A) Tap in the viewing area

• Select a joint by tapping on the bone (or bone unit) you want to move. Tap once or twice, until the bone color changes to purple.
• Deselect a joint by tapping on the black background (once or twice, depending on the color). The joint is deselected when the bone turns white or orange.

When tapping on bones, their identification & selection states are indicated by color, as follows:

Color	Identified	Selected
white	-	-
orange	✔	-
purple	✔	✔
blue	-	✔

Caution (Pro users only): If you press & hold your finger down (instead of immediately retracting it), you may inadvertently invoke the 'Show/Hide Bones' mode, instead of selecting a joint. If this happens, tap & hold again, to revert to regular joint selection mode - then retry tapping (quicker) to select the joint.

B) Use the 'Moving joint' menu:

• Select the joint by name from the menu.
• To deselect a joint, select 'None' from the menu.

This section presents some relevant background and limitations related to Selecting a Joint.

• Not all joints are movable
• Bone units
• Associating bones with joints

Not all joints are movable

Of all the anatomical joints that allow movement between bones, not all can be moved in KineBody, for various reaons:

1. Different KineBody editions: Joints within the hand and foot are available in KineBody Pro, but not in KineBody Basic Edition.
2. Low ROM: Joints with low range of motion (ROM) are usually not available, in any KineBody edition. For example, joints within the thorax (i.e., thoracic spine and costo-vertebral joints) are excluded.
3. Combinations & Coupling: Related anatomical joints may be combined, if possible. For example, the proximal & distal radio-ulnar joints (PRU, DRU) are combined into a single radio-ulnar joint in KineBody, because they share a common rotation axis. Similarly, at the knee, the patello-femoral joint is combined with the tibio-femoral joint, as the former doesn't normally operate independently of the latter.

Bone unit

Sometimes when you click on one bone to select its associated joint, many of its neighbors also turn blue, and the ‘associated’ joint may be some distance from the bone you clicked. This happens when the bone belongs to a KineBody bone unit: a set of adjacent bones that have no movable KineBody joints between them. Some of the characteristics of KineBody bone units are described in this section.

• Purpose: Bone units are designed to simplify joint selection: you can select a joint via any bone in the unit, but at the same time, you can still identify the individual bones.
• Important bone units: The skull (minus mandible) and thorax (ribs, thoracic vertebrae, & sternum) are formed into units, in all editions of KineBody. Other units are present depending on the Edition; some important examples are:
       KineBody Basic: hand, foot
       KineBody Pro:    central pillar (within hand), midfoot
• How to identify: When you hover over a bone and observe its name in the 'Pointing at' box, its unit name will appear as a prefix, if applicable. For example, 'skull / sphenoid' gives the unit name & then the bone name.

Associating bones with joints

In KineBody, you can select a joint by clicking on a nearby bone. In many cases, you select the joint by clicking on the 'bone you want to move'. This feature presumes a special association between bones and joints, which is described in this section.

For the most part, the bones & joints in KineBody are organized into a well-defined 'family-tree' hierarchy, with the following characteristics:

1. For each joint, there's a single associated bone (or bone unit). Generally, the bone or unit is 'distal' to the joint. Each such joint+bone (or joint+unit) combination can be regarded as an indivisibile unit, when discussing KineBody organization.
2. Each joint+bone (or joint+unit) combination attaches to a 'parent' bone or unit. Conversely, any bone can have one or more 'children'. But, no child has more than one parent. Together, these connections define a tree-like logical structure.
3. All connections emanate outward from the thorax as the single common ancestor or 'root' of the tree.

Because of (a), every joint can be selected by clicking on some bone or unit. As a result of (b) & (c), there's no ambiguity as to which bone goes with which joint: the associated bone, for any joint, is the one farther from the thorax, i.e., distal to the joint.

As the root of the tree, the thorax plays a special role. For one, it's the only bone or unit without a parent, and it has no associated joint. Thus, when you click on the thorax, nothing 'happens': there is no joint to select, no special sliders appear, and the thorax retains its normal bone color. [To clarify the last part: when a bone is colored blue, it means the associated joint is currently selected].

Additional information about the bone-joint hierarchy, including the full list of bone & joint names, is provided here.

A) Drag across the viewing area using 1 finger

1. Select a joint rotation axis, by tapping one of the joint rotation mode buttons ( ). Match the button arrow color to the the rotation axis color.
   
   


2. Drag in a direction as indicated by the arrow on the mode button:

   	drag normal to the axis.
   	drag in an arc, around the joint center (= the point where its rotation axes cross).

B) Use the gray sliders (Pro version only)

• Drag along the slider.

Problem	Cause / Solution
Movements are slow &/or jerky	Low memory Old browser
Colored cursor doesn't appear, when select from movement palette	Colored arrow cursors are not available for touch screens.
Can't move joints biaxially (as in the prior editions)	Biaxial joystick for joint rotation has been disabled for KineBody Basic
Mac only: Bone(s) jump back to previous position, when using full screen.	While viewing full screen, move cursor to very top of screen (so that Mac OS menu bar appears). Then resume regular operations - the jump problem should be gone.

This section provides additional information re: operation of some special joints in KineBody.

• Shoulder (sterno-clavicular & acromio-clavicular)
• Neck & lumbar spine (Pro only)

Shoulder joints (sterno-clavicular & acromio-clavicular)

In KineBody, the shoulder has a special property, whereby the scapula is forced to follow the posterior ribs, whenever you move the sterno-clavicular or acromio-clavicular joint. This property requires some special changes to the regular KineBody joint behavior. This is evident if you select the acromio-clavicular joint (by clicking on the scapula): three joint sliders will appear, but only one ('down/upward rotation') is usable, the other two being disabled. Yet, if you move the down/upward rotation slider, you can observe changing values at the other two sliders. In essence, the two disabled sliders are being used to enforce the constraint that makes the scapula follow the ribs. To put it another way, if these sliders were enabled, you could move the scapula unrealistically, away from the ribs, or into the ribs.

A similar situation occurs when you move the sterno-clavicular joint, but it's not readily apparent. In this case, two degrees of freedom (DOFs) for the acromio-clavicular joint are being used to keep the scapula close to the ribs, but the sliders for those DOFs aren't shown.

[Note: the current scapula constraint mechanism can be overridden, to allow full 3 DOF movement, via the Unlimited ROM feature in KineBody Pro / Advanced Option].

Neck & lumbar spine (Pro only)

KineBody Pro allows you to move multiple spine joints with a single control, in the neck or lumbar regions. You can select either of these 'joint groups', by name in the Moving joint menu. Or, to select the neck, click on the skull (group); for the lumbar region, click on the sacrum. Once selected, you can move the joints using the regular methods, i.e., using the gray joint sliders, or by dragging across the viewing area.

Note that when moving these joint groups, the rotation axes (pink, yellow, & cyan) sometimes move more 'freely' than regular/indivdual KineBody joints. That is, for a regular joint, if you try to rotate about any single axis, that axis will remain fixed in space...but if you try the same for the neck or lumbar spine, you can often observe the rotation axis changing its direction in space. This behavior is a side effect of the current joint-group mechanism *. Also note that the axes for these joint groups are rendered using dashed lines; this is done only to indicate that the axes may exhibit irregular behavior (i.e., by design - this is not a bug per se).

You can also select & move indivdual spinal joints, using the regular KineBody methods, with a couple of exceptions: of the neck joints, you can't move the Occiput-C1 joint individually, and the same goes for the L5S1 joint in the lumbar region. The reason is that, within the software, the group joint mechanism 'borrows' some of the regular parts from the individual joints. For instance, the neck uses the slider that would normally actuate the Occiput-C1 joint. Again, this is a limitation of the current joint group mechanism *.

* An improved mechanism which circumvents this effect is planned for future development, and, 'should be ready by Thanksgiving' (in some yet to be determined year).