Reaching movements performed from a crouched body posture require a shift of body weight from both arms to one arm. This situation has remained unexamined despite the analogous load requirements during step initiation and the many studies of reaching from a seated or standing posture. To determine whether the body weight shift involves anticipatory or exclusively reactive control, we obtained force plate records, hand kinematics, and arm muscle activity from 11 healthy right-handed participants. They performed reaching movements with their left and right arm in two speed contexts, “comfortable” and “as fast as possible,” and two postural contexts, a less stable knees-together posture and a more stable knees-apart posture. Weight-shifts involved anticipatory postural actions (APAs) by the reaching and stance arms that were opposing in the vertical axis and aligned in the side-to-side axis similar to APAs by the legs for step initiation. Weight-shift APAs were correlated in time and magnitude, present in both speed contexts, more vigorous with the knees placed together, and similar when reaching with the dominant and nondominant arm. The initial weight-shift was preceded by bursts of muscle activity in the shoulder and elbow extensors (posterior deltoid and triceps lateral) of the reach arm and shouldermore »
Synergistic Activation Patterns of Hand Muscles in Left-and Right-Hand Dominant Individuals
Abstract Handedness has been associated with behavioral asymmetries between limbs that suggest specialized function of dominant and non-dominant hand. Whether patterns of muscle co-activation, representing muscle synergies, also differ between the limbs remains an open question. Previous investigations of proximal upper limb muscle synergies have reported little evidence of limb asymmetry; however, whether the same is true of the distal upper limb and hand remains unknown. This study compared forearm and hand muscle synergies between the dominant and non-dominant limb of left-handed and right-handed participants. Participants formed their hands into the postures of the American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet, while EMG was recorded from hand and forearm muscles. Muscle synergies were extracted for each limb individually by applying non-negative-matrix-factorization (NMF). Extracted synergies were compared between limbs for each individual, and between individuals to assess within and across participant differences. Results indicate no difference between the limbs for individuals, but differences in limb synergies at the population level. Left limb synergies were found to be more similar than right limb synergies across left- and right-handed individuals. Synergies of the left hand of left dominant individuals were found to have greater population level similarity than the other limbs tested. Results are interpreted more »
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10301219
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Human Kinetics
- Volume:
- 76
- Issue:
- 1
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 89 to 100
- ISSN:
- 1899-7562
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract The extent to which hand dominance may influence how each agent contributes to inter-personal coordination remains unknown. In the present study, right-handed human participants performed object balancing tasks either in dyadic conditions with each agent using one hand (left or right), or in bimanual conditions where each agent performed the task individually with both hands. We found that object load was shared between two hands more asymmetrically in dyadic than single-agent conditions. However, hand dominance did not influence how two hands shared the object load. In contrast, hand dominance was a major factor in modulating hand vertical movement speed. Furthermore, the magnitude of internal force produced by two hands against each other correlated with the synchrony between the two hands’ movement in dyads. This finding supports the important role of internal force in haptic communication. Importantly, both internal force and movement synchrony were affected by hand dominance of the paired participants. Overall, these results demonstrate, for the first time, that pairing of one dominant and one non-dominant hand may promote asymmetrical roles within a dyad during joint physical interactions. This appears to enable the agent using the dominant hand to actively maintain effective haptic communication and task performance.
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Ultrasound-based sensing of muscle deformation, known as sonomyography, has shown promise for accurately classifying the intended hand grasps of individuals with upper limb loss in offline settings. Building upon this previous work, we present the first demonstration of real-time prosthetic hand control using sonomyography to perform functional tasks. An individual with congenital bilateral limb absence was fitted with sockets containing a low-profile ultrasound transducer placed over forearm muscle tissue in the residual limbs. A classifier was trained using linear discriminant analysis to recognize ultrasound images of muscle contractions for three discrete hand configurations (rest, tripod grasp, index finger point) under a variety of arm positions designed to cover the reachable workspace. A prosthetic hand mounted to the socket was then controlled using this classifier. Using this real-time sonomyographic control, the participant was able to complete three functional tasks that required selecting different hand grasps in order to grasp and move one-inch wooden blocks over a broad range of arm positions. Additionally, these tests were successfully repeated without retraining the classifier across 3 hours of prosthesis use and following simulated donning and doffing of the socket. This study supports the feasibility of using sonomyography to control upper limb prostheses in real-world applications.
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The hypothesis that the central nervous system (CNS) makes use of synergies or movement primitives in achieving simple to complex movements has inspired the investigation of different types of synergies. Kinematic and muscle synergies have been extensively studied in the literature, but only a few studies have compared and combined both types of synergies during the control and coordination of the human hand. In this paper, synergies were extracted first independently (called kinematic and muscle synergies) and then combined through data fusion (called musculoskeletal synergies) from 26 activities of daily living in 22 individuals using principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA). By a weighted linear combination of musculoskeletal synergies, the recorded kinematics and the recorded muscle activities were reconstructed. The performances of musculoskeletal synergies in reconstructing the movements were compared to the synergies reported previously in the literature by us and others. The results indicate that the musculoskeletal synergies performed better than the synergies extracted without fusion. We attribute this improvement in performance to the musculoskeletal synergies that were generated on the basis of the cross-information between muscle and kinematic activities. Moreover, the synergies extracted using ICA performed better than the synergies extracted using PCA. These musculoskeletalmore »
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Converging evidence in human and animal models suggests that exogenous stimulation of the motor cortex (M1) elicits responses in the hand with similar modular structure to that found during voluntary grasping movements. The aim of this study was to establish the extent to which modularity in muscle responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to M1 resembles modularity in muscle activation during voluntary hand movements involving finger fractionation. EMG was recorded from eight hand-forearm muscles in nine healthy individuals. Modularity was defined using non-negative matrix factorization to identify low rank approximations (spatial muscle synergies) of the complex activation patterns of EMG data recorded during high density TMS mapping of M1 and voluntary formation of gestures in the American Sign Language alphabet. Analysis of synergies as a set, and individually, revealed greater than chance similarity between those derived from TMS and those derived from voluntary movement. Both datasets included synergies dominated by single intrinsic hand muscles presumably to meet the demand for highly fractionated finger movement. These results suggest a cortical role in combining corticospinal connectivity to individual intrinsic hand muscles with modular mulit-muscle activation via synergies.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.2478/hukin-2021-0002
