Quantitative assessment of the EMG patterns of upper limb muscles during robotic rehabilitation

Human upper limb is involved in many daily human activities. The muscle activities during basic and daily upper-limb motions are an important area of research in rehabilitation field in order to evaluate the recovery of patients affected by congenital or acquired brain injury. Much better results in sensorimotor and cognitive processes are promised by the emerging robot-mediated therapy. Although the shoulder is the most complex joint in the body, both as to freedom range and for the musculartendon structure, not so many research devices have been proposed to study its movements and no study has proposed standardized electromyographic assessment during robot-assisted reaching movements of the upper arm. This study aimed to develop a quantitative assessment of the electromyographic pattern of the arm’s muscles involved in reaching movements robot-assisted by means of indices used to describe effectively the main features of the pattern in five normal subjects to implement rehabilitation strategies patients oriented.