In September 1997, an educational programme in Biomedical Engineering, unique in the Netherlands, started at the Eindhoven University of Technology, together with the University of Maastricht, as a logical step after almost two decades of research collaboration between both universities. This development culminated in the foundation of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in April 1999 and the creation of a graduate programme (MSc) in Biomedical Engineering in 2000 and Medical Engineering in 2002.

Already at the start of this educational programme, it was decided that a comprehensive course in biomechanics had to be part of the curriculum and that this course had to start right at the beginning of the Bachelor phase. A search for suitable material for this purpose showed that excellent biomechanics textbooks exist. But many of these books are very specialized to certain aspects of biomechanics. The more general textbooks address mechanical or civil engineers or physicists who wish to specialize in biomechanics, so these books include chapters or sections on biology and physiology. Almost all books that were found are at Masters or post-graduate level, requiring basic to sophisticated knowledge of mechanics and mathematics. At a more fundamental level, only books could be found that were written for mechanical and civil engineers.

We decided to write our own course material for the basic training in mechanics appropriate for our candidate biomedical engineers at Bachelor level, starting with the basic concepts of mechanics and ending with numerical solution procedures, based on the finite element method. The course material assembled in the current book comprises three courses for our biomedical engineering curriculum, distributed over the three years of their Bachelor studies. Chapters 1 to 6 mostly treat the basic concepts of forces, moments and equilibrium in a discrete context in the first year. Chapters 7 to 13 in the second year discuss the basis of continuum mechanics, and Chapters 14 to 18 in the third year are focussed on solving the field equations of mechanics using the finite element method.