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Abstract BackgroundMuscle synergies, computationally identified intermuscular coordination patterns, have been utilized to characterize neuromuscular control and learning in humans. However, it is unclear whether it is possible to alter the existing muscle synergies or develop new ones in an intended way through a relatively short-term motor exercise in adulthood. This study aimed to test the feasibility of expanding the repertoire of intermuscular coordination patterns through an isometric, electromyographic (EMG) signal-guided exercise in the upper extremity (UE) of neurologically intact individuals. Methods10 participants were trained for six weeks to induce independent control of activating a pair of elbow flexor muscles that tended to be naturally co-activated in force generation. An untrained isometric force generation task was performed to assess the effect of the training on the intermuscular coordination of the trained UE. We applied a non-negative matrix factorization on the EMG signals recorded from 12 major UE muscles during the assessment to identify the muscle synergies. In addition, the performance of training tasks and the characteristics of individual muscles’ activity in both time and frequency domains were quantified as the training outcomes. ResultsTypically, in two weeks of the training, participants could use newly developed muscle synergies when requested to perform new, untrained motor tasks by activating their UE muscles in the trained way. Meanwhile, their habitually expressed muscle synergies, the synergistic muscle activation groups that were used before the training, were conserved throughout the entire training period. The number of muscle synergies activated for the task performance remained the same. As the new muscle synergies were developed, the neuromotor control of the trained muscles reflected in the metrics, such as the ratio between the targeted muscles, number of matched targets, and task completion time, was improved. ConclusionThese findings suggest that our protocol can increase the repertoire of readily available muscle synergies and improve motor control by developing the activation of new muscle coordination patterns in healthy adults within a relatively short period. Furthermore, the study shows the potential of the isometric EMG-guided protocol as a neurorehabilitation tool for aiming motor deficits induced by abnormal intermuscular coordination after neurological disorders. Trial registrationThis study was registered at the Clinical Research Information Service (CRiS) of the Korea National Institute of Health (KCT0005803) on 1/22/2021.
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This content will become publicly available on September 25, 2026
Separable hierarchical priors applied to analysis of synergies in human locomotion
It has been hypothesized that during a motion task the central nervous system controls the skeletal muscles partitioning them into synergetic groups, hence effectively reducing the dimensionality of the control problem. The identification of muscle groups that are co-activated remains an open problem: its solution could have important implications in the design of training or rehabilitation protocols. In this article, we combine Bayesian inverse problem techniques and data science algorithms to identify muscle synergies in human motion from the motion tracker time series of positions of fiducial markers on the body during the task. The inverse problem of estimating the muscle activation patterns from the motion tracking data is cast in the Bayesian framework, and the posterior distribution of muscle activations is explored using Myobolica, a Gibbs-sampler-based Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler. A low-rank approximation of the muscle activation patterns is then obtained via a sparsity promoting Bayesian non-negative matrix factorization of the sample mean, where the sparse coefficient vectors correspond to groups of muscles that show co-activation over the sample. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Frontiers of applied inverse problems in science and engineering’.
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- PAR ID:
- 10651749
- Publisher / Repository:
- Royal Society Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
- Volume:
- 383
- Issue:
- 2305
- ISSN:
- 1364-503X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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