FELS: An efficient biomechanical tongue model for speech research

Abstract. We describe our investigation of a fast 3D finite element method (FEM) for biomedical simulation of a muscle-activated human tongue. Our method uses a linear stiffness-warping scheme to achieve simulation speeds which are within a factor 10 of real-time rates at the expense of a small loss in accuracy. Muscle activations are produced by an arrangement of forces acting along se-lected edges of the FEM geometry. The model’s dynamics are integrated using an implicit Euler formulation, which can be solved using either the conjugate gradient method or a direct sparse solver. To assess the utility of this model, we compare its accuracy against slower, but less approximate, simulations of a reference tongue model prepared using the FEM simulation package ANSYS