Neuro-Muscular Engineering
Sohrab Barimani; Ali Maleki; Ali Fallah
Volume 8, Issue 1 , March 2014, , Pages 101-111
Abstract
FES based method used for rehabilitation of patients with spinal cord injury (SCI). One of these methods is FES cycling. FES cycling exercise has to be useful among SCI patients because of creating a periodic activity in the muscles of the lower extremities and stability of seating position. The major ...
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FES based method used for rehabilitation of patients with spinal cord injury (SCI). One of these methods is FES cycling. FES cycling exercise has to be useful among SCI patients because of creating a periodic activity in the muscles of the lower extremities and stability of seating position. The major challenge for application of FES in rehabilitation is early fatigue occurrence in electrically stimulated muscles. Motor control system selects a low-cost path among the infinite possible route to the body's movements. High efficiency and the minimum rate of muscle fatigue are main characteristics of the motor control system. This type of control system is called muscle synergy. In this study, the quantification of muscle synergy between the core muscles in cycling has been done by non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method and considering the kinesiology basis. Four synergies were determined as appropriate and optimal synergies to describe the cycling in different mechanical terms. VAF criteria with regard to the four synergies to describe cycling in speeds of 40, 50 and 60 rpm are 92±4, 92±3 and 91±4% respectively and torques, 5, 7 and 9 Nm are 91±3, 92±5 and 92±4% respectively. Correlation between Synergies extracted at different mechanical terms is 98.4 percent in average.
