Development of a sarcomere model using hardware

We are developing a hardware model of sarcomere dynamics to obtain a better understanding of how groups of sarcomeres interact to produce macroscopic muscle behaviors. Both the computational complexity of the sarcomeres and muscle's highly parallel nature have limited previous attempts to model muscle at the level of crossbridge dynamics. Real-time models of muscle structure and dynamics can be implemented, however, using very large-scale integrated circuits, which share muscle's computational complexity and parallelism. This paper addresses the mathematical models that will underlie the implementation of such a crossbridge-level, hardware model of sarcomere dynamics.