Muscle Synergies in Response to Biofeedback-Driven Gait Adaptations in Children With Cerebral Palsy (original) (raw)
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Neuromuscular Control before and after Independent Walking Onset in Children with Cerebral Palsy
Sensors
Early brain lesions which produce cerebral palsy (CP) may affect the development of walking. It is unclear whether or how neuromuscular control, as evaluated by muscle synergy analysis, differs in young children with CP compared to typically developing (TD) children with the same walking ability, before and after the onset of independent walking. Here we grouped twenty children with (high risk of) CP and twenty TD children (age 6.5–52.4 months) based on their walking ability, supported or independent walking. Muscle synergies were extracted from electromyography data of bilateral leg muscles using non-negative matrix factorization. Number, synergies’ structure and variability accounted for when extracting one (VAF1) or two (VAF2) synergies were compared between CP and TD. Children in the CP group recruited fewer synergies with higher VAF1 and VAF2 compared to TD children in the supported and independent walking group. The most affected side in children with asymmetric CP walking ind...
2017
Human locomotion is a complex motor task. Previous research hypothesized that muscle synergies reflect the modular control of muscle groups operated by the Central Nervous System (CNS). Despite the high stride-to-stride variability characterizing human gait, most studies analyze only a few strides. This may be limiting, because the intra-subject variability of motor output is neglected. This gap could be filled by recording and analyzing many gait cycles during a single walking task. In this way, it can be investigated if CNS recruits the same muscle synergies consistently or if different strategies are adopted during the locomotion task. The aim of this work is to investigate the intra-subject consistency of muscle synergies during overground walking. Twelve young healthy volunteers were instructed to walk for 5 min at their natural pace. On the average, 181 ± 10 gait cycles were analyzed for each subject. Surface electromyography was recorded from 12 muscles of the dominant lower limb and the trunk. Gait cycles were grouped into subgroups containing 10 gait cycles each. The consistency of the muscle synergies extracted during the gait trial was assessed by measuring cosine similarity (CS) of muscle weights vectors, and zero-lag cross-correlation (CC) of activation signals. The average intra-subject CS and CC were 0.94 ± 0.10 and 0.96 ± 0.06, respectively. We found five synergies shared by all the subjects: high consistency values were found for these synergies (CS = 0.96 ± 0.05, CC = 0.97 ± 0.03). In addition, we found 10 subject-specific synergies. These synergies were less consistent (CS = 0.80 ± 0.20, CC = 0.89 ± 0.14). In conclusion, our results demonstrated that shared muscle synergies were highly consistent during walking. Subject-specific muscle synergies were also consistent, although to a lesser extent.
2017 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC), 2017
Motor control strategies can be described by muscle synergies, a model of functional muscle recruitment to perform a movement. However, stability of muscle synergies during locomotion has not yet been investigated. The objective of this work was the evaluation of the stability of muscle synergies while walking at normal (NS) and fast (FS) speed. Each walking condition was tested during a prolonged session lasting 5 minutes on five healthy subjects. After data processing with statistical gait analysis, 168±29 valid strides in NS and 181±48 in FS were obtained. They were aggregated in subgroups, with 10 strides each. Muscle synergies were extracted for all subgroups with non-negative matrix factorization. On the average, 6 synergies were suitable to reconstruct the original electromyographic signal. They were functionally correlated to the activities of propulsion, trunk stability, limb deceleration at the end of swing, forefoot control, and limb stiffening for initial contact stabili...