Towards jaw-tongue coupling for speech: modeling the jaw with a soft body approach

International audienceThe jaw plays a significant role in speech production. This work introduces a muscle activated dynamic jaw model that will be connected in the future to the 3D tongue model already developed by our group. The bone structure of the jaw, extracted from CT Images, is represented as a biomechanical model using quadrilateral shell elements. Opener and closer muscles are represented as line-segmented link elements. The temporomandibular joint constraints are defined as nodal limits. The combined bone, muscle, and joint model is simulated in the ANSYS software package