Pinpointed muscle force control via optimising human motion and external force

The main focus of our research is to control the load of selected muscles by using a power-assisting device, thus enabling more effective motion support, rehabilitation and training by explicitly specifying the target muscles. In our past research, a control method was proposed for static human motion. The results of simulation and experiments showed that it is possible to control the force of selected muscle individually. However, the past method we proposed was only considered for constant posture, which led to a large effect of non-target muscle. In this paper, a new pinpointed muscle force control method is proposed to reduce the effect of non-target muscle taking into account human motion and external force. Human motion and external force was optimized individually in a double-loop searching algorithm, which reduced the computational cost. By calculating the posture step by step, this method can also be used for quasi-static motion. The validity of this method was confirmed by measuring surface EMG signals for each muscle.