POSE: Phase I: Open Knee(s) - An Open Source Ecosystem for Advancement of Knee Biomechanics

Open Knee(s) seeks to democratize research and innovation to understand and restore knee function. Developing resources required for scientific studies of joint biomechanics is not trivial, especially for simulation-based investigations. Publicly available resources are scarce, disorganized, and often lack adequate documentation. Nonetheless, studies on joint mechanics are imperative to support progress and harness the potential of those who have the need but not the means to generate foundational resources. An open-source ecosystem will foster collaboration, facilitate transfer of knowledge, and address implementation challenges for discovery and innovation in knee biomechanics. The Open Knee(s) ecosystem will allow unfettered access to virtual knees and related data, tools, and expertise. It will be a rallying point to accelerate foundational studies on knee function and virtual design and development of solutions for management of knee problems. For early career scientists and engineers, it will remove the barriers to entry to the field of knee biomechanics. Most importantly, Open Knee(s) ecosystem will be community-driven, going beyond access to extensive models, data, and computational tools, but also learning opportunities and engagement with experts in the field. The objectives of this project are to scope and plan the transformation of Open Knee(s) from an open-source product to an open-source ecosystem for computational knee biomechanics. First, the team will identify the proper infrastructure and operational prerequisites by active involvement of the existing user base. The team will also harness the insights of other open-source ecosystems for guidance and then reinforce frameworks and roadmaps for the evolution, growth, connectivity and sustainability of the ecosystem. Finally, the project will seed a distributed collaborative developer community for modeling and simulation by engaging, educating, and enabling stakeholders virtually and in-person. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.