Biomechanics / Biomechanical Engineering
Mahdi Bagheri Rouchi; Mehrdad Davoudi; Mohammad Parnianpour
Volume 13, Issue 2 , August 2019, , Pages 177-187
Abstract
According to the literature, changes in muscle activity patterns are considered as one of the causes of non-specific chronic low back pain. Recent studies have introduced muscle synergy as a valuable tool for analyzing how muscles work in body movements. In this way, a new study method is proposed for ...
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According to the literature, changes in muscle activity patterns are considered as one of the causes of non-specific chronic low back pain. Recent studies have introduced muscle synergy as a valuable tool for analyzing how muscles work in body movements. In this way, a new study method is proposed for modeling upper body and extracting time-varying muscle synergies in flexural motion of the waist. In this way, a new study method is proposed for modeling trunk and extracting time-varying muscle synergies in plane bending movements of lumbar flexion. Considering 18 effective muscles and function of the combined cost of the minimum jerk-energy, 24 different movements and their corresponding muscle patterns have been simulated. To evaluate the role of velocity, the pattern of muscle activity was divided into two parts: tonic, to overcome the gravity force, and phasic, proportional to the trunk movement velocity. In the following, three fast-reaching times of 0.75, 1, and 2 seconds were considered for each direction. The results showed that 77% of the lumbar muscle pattern of movement was achieved by four phasic synergies and four tonic synergies. The resulting synergies are quite influenced by the movement direction and velocity, so that each pair of phasic and tonic synergy is most effective in one of the main directions. On the other hand, the increase in velocity causes elevated amplitude coefficient and accelerated activation of phasic synergies compared to normal mode. Considering the 45° flexion combination with 30° left lateral bending, 77.2% of the muscle pattern of movement has been reconstructed using time-varying synergies. It can be argued that the use of muscle synergies expresses a good explanation for how muscles work in movement at different directions and velocities.
Rehabilitation Engineering
Vahab Nekoukar; Abbas Erfanian Omidvar
Volume 4, Issue 4 , June 2010, , Pages 327-336
Abstract
One major limitation of walker-supported walking using functional electrical stimulation (FES) in paraplegic subjects is the high energy expenditure and the high upper body effort. Paraplegics should exert high amount of hand force to stabilize the body posture and to compensate lack of the sufficient ...
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One major limitation of walker-supported walking using functional electrical stimulation (FES) in paraplegic subjects is the high energy expenditure and the high upper body effort. Paraplegics should exert high amount of hand force to stabilize the body posture and to compensate lack of the sufficient torques at the lower extremity joints. In this paper, we introduce a 2-D musculoskeletal model of walker-assisted FES-supported walking of paraplegics. Using the developed model and an optimal controller, the stimulation patterns are determined such that the tracking errors of lower joint reference trajectories are minimized and the muscle activations and the handle reaction force (HRF) are reduced. Outputs of the optimal controller are stimulation patterns of the lower body muscles and torque acting on the upper body joints. The results show that the HRF and ground reaction force (GRF) generated by simulation are in agreement with the measured HRF and GRF. Moreover, the results indicate that the simulation-generated stimulation patterns of lower body muscles are in consist with the stimulation patterns reported in the literatures.
