Black-box characterization of soft connective biological tissues

The present work deals with discrete-time models for the relaxation of soft biological connective tissues. Those are living materials composed of living cells embedded in a mainly organic intercellular substance. Wiener models, consisting of a linear dynamical model followed by a polynomial static function are used for identification of stress relaxation curves, drawn from experiments performed on samples of bovine pericardium. The experimental protocol and results are briefly described. In order to identify the parameters of a Wiener model a simple but effective two-steps iterative algorithm is proposed.