Biomechanics & Injury Mechanics
Service details
Whether an event could produce the injury at issue is a question of force, motion, and tissue tolerance, so it has to be answered on the physics.
What this service is
Engineering analysis of how a specific event loaded the human body, and then whether that loading is mechanically consistent with the injury at issue. The body is evaluated as a load-bearing system of bone, ligament, tendon, disc, and soft tissue, each with published mechanical tolerances. The work covers the cervical and lumbar spine, the thoracic spine and hips, the shoulder and upper extremity, the knee and lower extremity, the foot and ankle, and the head under impact and high-energy loading — across motor-vehicle events, falls, struck-by and falling-object events, equipment and machinery incidents, and sports, fitness, and recreational equipment.
How Scienalysis does the work
Scienalysis reconstructs the loading environment from the physical record and the equipment or structure involved, quantifies the load that reached the body through first-principles mechanics — supported, when the matter requires it, by finite element and explicit-dynamics analysis — and evaluates that load against peer-reviewed tissue-tolerance data and the injuries documented in the medical record. The work is engineering rather than medical diagnosis, so diagnoses are taken as documented by treating physicians, and the analysis addresses whether the mechanics of the event are consistent with them. Finally, conclusions are framed to the standard that governs expert work: reliable method, sufficient data, and reasoning defensible step by step.
Plaintiff and defense counsel, carriers, and SIU in personal-injury, wrongful-death, premises, product, and workplace matters when the mechanism of injury is contested.
A retained engineering analysis rather than a medical opinion, a records summary, or an informal causation call.
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The body as a load-bearing structure.
Each region carries load through its own tissues, in its own modes, to its own published limits. The analysis then follows the load to the tissue at issue.
Cervical & lumbar spine
Vertebral, disc, and ligamentous loading in flexion, extension, compression, and shear.
Thoracic spine & hips
Axial and bending load paths through the thoracic column, pelvis, and hip joint.
Shoulder & upper extremity
Tendon, labral, and joint loading from direct impact, traction, and bracing.
Knee & lower extremity
Ligament, meniscal, and long-bone loading under impact, twisting, and axial force.
Foot & ankle
Axial, inversion, and eversion loading at ground-contact, pedal, and footwell interfaces.
Head impact & high-energy trauma
Contact force, head acceleration, and load duration in blunt-impact and high-energy events, as well as penetrating and ballistic mechanisms.
Where the mechanism is the question.
Motor-vehicle occupant events
Occupant kinematics, restraint interaction, and then the load path into the spine and extremities. Where vehicle structure is also at issue, the work runs alongside Crashworthiness & Occupant Protection.
Crashworthiness →Falls and elevated surfaces
Fall trajectory, body orientation at contact, and then impact loading at the ground or structure.
Struck-by and falling objects
Object mass, drop height, contact geometry, and therefore the resulting load on the neck, shoulder, and upper body.
Equipment and machinery incidents
Machine or tool motion, the human contact pathway, and then whether the energy the equipment could deliver is consistent with the injury claimed.
Product & Equipment Inspection →Sports, fitness & recreational equipment
How a component failed, and then how that failure loaded the person using it.
Penetrating and ballistic trauma
Projectile behavior and penetration mechanics applied to the wound path and the mechanism of injury.
Three questions, answered in order.
What happened mechanically
Establish the loading environment from the physical evidence, specifically what moved, how fast, in what direction, and what the body contacted.
What reached the body
Then determine the force, acceleration, duration, and rate of the load, and compare them against published tissue tolerances.
What the record supports
Finally, evaluate whether the mechanism is consistent with the injuries documented by treating physicians, and state what the evidence does and does not support.
Built on high-energy mechanics.
Dr. Jaton N. Wince, Ph.D., has worked extensively as an engineering expert on occupant protection and injury causation in high-energy events. His record includes retention as the biomechanics and injury-causation expert in a wrongful-death matter, defense-program analysis of occupant response in personnel carriers and hull-breach mitigation for occupant survivability, and penetration and high-rate impact mechanics at the Air Force Research Laboratory.