1 · What CONTINUUM is — and is not

It is a literature-informed simulation for research and education. You give it a mechanical change; it shows you what a published-style model of the body and its receptors predicts.

• Not a medical device.
• Not a diagnostic tool.
• Not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
• It does not provide patient-specific clinical measurements or histological truth.

Display motion is often exaggerated so it can be seen, and every number is a model output rather than a lab recording. Do not use CONTINUUM to make clinical decisions. The mental model to hold: this is a wind tunnel, not a clinic.

CONTINUUM is a RexMetrix Technologies, LLC simulation for exploring multi-scale anatomy and simplified receptor models. It is not an implementation of the Foundation measurement programme, not a test of mechanical restriction as specified in Kim (2026), and not a diagnostic tool. Where the research literature is cited, Kim (2026) is a research specification — a programme of proposed measurements — not a dataset that CONTINUUM was fitted to or validated against, and CONTINUUM is not its official software.

The organising idea CONTINUUM borrows from that literature is anatomical, not fascial: a cranial-nerve-adjacent and midline-visceral mechanosensory array, unified by high mechanoreceptor density and short afferent paths to brainstem and autonomic nuclei. The solved structure you see — nodes, cables, struts — is a discrete teaching network (position-based dynamics): a teaching metaphor for how load can redistribute through connected tissue, not a measurement model of any continuous tissue property.

2 · The first-time path

1. Disclaimer — tick the box, press I understand — enter CONTINUUM. It cannot be skipped.
2. Start screen — what each tier includes. Press Start exploring.
3. Guided tour — ten short steps over the real interface. Enter advances, Esc leaves.
4. Explore. Nothing else is mandatory.

To run the tour again: Restart guided tour, just below. To replay the whole first-run path from scratch, in the browser console:

CONTINUUM.disclaimer.reset();
CONTINUUM.tour.reset();
location.reload();

3 · Moving and changing scale

• Drag to orbit · right-drag or two-finger drag to pan · wheel or pinch to move in and out.
• The wheel does not merely zoom — it traverses six orders of magnitude, from the standing body to the interior of a single cell.
• Scale rail, top centre: Body → Region → Organ → Tissue → Receptor → Cell. Keys 1–6 jump between them.
• M dives into the selected structure — one continuous descent from wherever you are into its microscopic tissue. Shift+M pins Microscope mode.
• Explorer covers Body and Region; the deeper four are Professional.

4 · Systems and inspection

• Left panel toggles each system: skin, fascia, myofascial lines, muscle, bone, organs, nerves, vessels, lymph, receptors.
• S on a row isolates that system; reset clears the isolation.
• Click a structure to inspect it — live mechanical state, sensory population, afferent pathway.
• Shift-click adds to the selection. Double-click flies to a structure.
• I isolate · X hide · R reset.

5 · Mechanical intervention

Right panel. Five modes: Tension, Compression, Restriction, Shear, Release.

1. Select one or more structures.
2. Pick a mode, set magnitude and field radius.
3. Apply to selection. Release all returns the network to its resting pre-tension.

These change the model's mechanical field so you can explore how force redistributes. They are not a treatment simulator and do not represent any clinical procedure or its outcome. The Restriction control in particular is a modelling assumption about delivered excursion — it is not, and does not measure, the latent, vector-valued, instrument-inferred “mechanical restriction” specified in Kim (2026).

6 · The live meters

The bottom strip is entirely Layer C — composite summaries. Every meter carries a C tag, and hovering it shows the actual formula.

They are real arithmetic over real state, and they compress something multi-dimensional into one bar. They are not measurements. Signal integrity, for instance, is a weighted product of three modelled quantities whose exponents were chosen, not measured. Full definitions: METRICS.md.

7 · Microscope mode

Past the Tissue tier — or Shift+M — the microscope anchors to the anatomy under your look-at point: the structure you have selected if there is one, otherwise the nearest tissue. It binds the micro-mechanics to that structure's own network element and opens the receptor bed that actually lives there — spindle in mid-belly muscle, Golgi organ toward the myotendinous junction, Ruffini in dense fascia, Meissner in skin, interoceptive terminals on viscera, Pacinian at periosteum. Strain, firing and congestion all read the local solve at that site. The view is schematic and model-driven, not microscopy.

• The camera is free at depth — orbit, pan and dolly as at any scale; the subject holds still instead of turning to face you. Roam clearly away and the microscope re-anchors to wherever you have gone.
• Selecting a structure while the microscope runs moves it there — selection is the “examine this” gesture at every scale.

• Basic (default) — firing from length and velocity. The drive this ROI was verified against.
• Extended (opt-in) — adds stretch history, a tension-and-yank-style drive, and schematic static / dynamic γ drive. Simplified and educational, inspired by published phenomena; the citation appears beside the read-out whenever it is running.
• Scenarios — educational stretch shapes (ramp–hold–release, history pair, velocity series). Watch for saturation warnings before reading any result.

Extended mode takes two qualitative targets from Blum et al. 2020 — history dependence recovering over seconds, and a dynamic response that grows with stretch speed. It is not a reproduction of that work, is not fitted to it, and no numeric agreement is claimed. See MICRO_MODE.md.

The Cell tier. Below the receptor the descent continues into a schematic fibroblast-like cell in its matrix: a sectionable membrane, nucleus and organelles, cytoskeletal filaments, and a dense molecular crowd over a fine-grain matrix. The same solve still drives it — the cell stretches with the muscle it lives in, its stress fibres and adhesions brighten under load, and the crowd stops seething when the physiology is held. Apply restriction, compression or tension with the ordinary tools and the interior congests: complexes clump toward condensation loci, their motion slows, the stress fibres run hot and the membrane trembles — the solver's own stiffening, viscosity and pressure fields at this cell's element, mapped onto crowd behaviour. Release, and it disperses.

The cellular interior is an illustrative composition in the visual language of integrative cell reconstructions. It is not derived from any imaging dataset; organelle counts, shapes and colours are pedagogical, and the molecular complexes are drawn larger than life so they remain legible. Nothing at this tier is a measurement.

8 · Computational experiments

One protocol run twice — once clean, once perturbed — with everything else held identical.

1. Right panel → Computational experiment.
2. Choose a protocol, a perturbation (restriction, tension, release) and a magnitude.
3. Run experiment. The table reports baseline, perturbed and Δ, tagged by layer.

Results are in-silico predictions under modelling assumptions. How a perturbation reaches the receptor — less transmission, more lag — is this product's own assumption, carrying the citation key REX_MODELLING_ASSUMPTION and no literature source. Not human data, and not evidence for or against any hypothesis.

If a run saturates, the panel says so. A Δ of zero from a saturated run means the rate ceiling absorbed the effect — that is a model limitation, not "no effect".

9 · Model layers A / B / C

Every number carries a tag saying what kind of claim it is.

• AMechanical proxy — length, strain, tension proxy, yank, cross-bridge availability. From the solver, in stated units. Nothing here was measured in tissue.
• BLiterature-style model — firing rate, spike times, adaptation, conduction delay, history ratios. The serious scientific surface, and still a model output.
• CComposite summary — network load, signal integrity, peak rise, asymmetry. Labelled summaries for the instrument strip, not primary outputs.

10 · Validation matrix

An inventory of how well grounded each part of this product actually is. Sixteen modules, each classified grounded, partial, novel, speculative or out_of_scope_v1, with what would have to be shown to move it up and an honest next action.

Validated against measured human data: 0. No module claims it, and the status enum has no value for it.

Read it in VALIDATION_MATRIX.md, or from the console:

CONTINUUM.validation.summary()      // counts by status
CONTINUUM.validation.needsSourcing() // the working to-do list

The largest gap, stated plainly there: the whole-body afferent constants in anatomy/info.js carry no provenance at all — no range, no species, no source — while the later micro path has all three for every constant. The older, more visible module is the weaker one.

And the point that matters most: in-sim results neither support nor falsify any human hypothesis. This model was built to express a set of mechanical ideas, so it cannot also be their test. Support would need foundation measurement protocols and independent physiological outcomes — neither of which is in this software.

11 · Citations and credit

• MICRO_MODE.md — receptor equations, parameters, limits, implemented vs missing.
• src/data/micro/literature_params.js — every constant with range, unit, species and citation.
• VALIDATION_MATRIX.md — module-by-module grounding.
• METRICS.md — Level C definitions and formulas.

Extended mode is inspired by Blum KP et al. (2020) eLife 9:e55177 for its qualitative targets only — not a reproduction, not fitted to it.

Every parameter record currently carries verified: false, including the one whose DOI is known. A human must check each against its primary source before any of it supports a published claim.

12 · Keyboard and tips