Postural synergies describe characteristic patterns of actuation in human hands arising from biomechanical constraints, physical tendon coupling, and neurological control schemes. Often, a small number of synergies contain much of the information required to describe an entire human hand posture, with 80% or more of the total information encoded in only two component values. Synergies have comm...

Recently developed computational techniques have been used to reduce muscle activation patterns of high complexity to a simple synergy organization and to bring new insights to the long-standing degrees of freedom problem in motor control. We used a non-negative factorization approach to identify muscle synergies during postural responses in the cat and further, to examine the functional signif...

Ranganathan R, Krishnan C. Extracting synergies in gait: using EMG variability to evaluate control strategies. J Neurophysiol 108: 1537–1544, 2012. First published June 20, 2012; doi:10.1152/jn.01112.2011.—There has been extensive debate as to whether muscle synergies in motor tasks reflect underlying neural organization or simply correlations in muscle activity that are imposed by the task. On...

Pattern generators found in the spinal cord are no more seen as simple rhythmic oscillators for motion control. Indeed, they achieve flexible and dynamical coordination in interaction with the body and the environment dynamics giving to rise motor synergies. Discovering the mechanisms underlying the control of motor synergies constitutes an important research question not only for neuroscience ...

Because humans have limited ability to independently control the many joints of the hand, a wide variety of hand shapes can be characterized as a weighted combination of just two or three main patterns of covariation in joint rotations, or "postural synergies." The present study sought to align muscle synergies with these main postural synergies and to describe the form of membership of motor u...

A few kinematic synergies identified by principal component analysis (PCA) account for most of the variance in the coordinated joint rotations of the fingers and wrist used for a wide variety of hand movements. To examine the possibility that motor cortex might control the hand through such synergies, we collected simultaneous kinematic and neurophysiological data from monkeys performing a reac...

The complexity of robotic hands is needed to adapt devices to the many kinds of tasks, but the large number of motors needed to fully actuate the DoFs comes at the cost of size, complexity and weight of devices. A possible approach to solve this problem consists of reducing the number of actuators thus resulting more efficient, simpler and reliable than their fully actuated alternatives. Reduci...

Dramatic changes in ecosystem services have motivated recent work characterizing their interactions, including identifying trade-offs and synergies. Although time is arguably implicit in these ideas of trade-offs and synergies (e.g., temporal dynamics or changes in ecosystem services), such interactions are routinely inferred based on the spatial relationships among ecosystem services alone (e....

Title of Document: HANDWRITING KINETICS: A SEARCH FOR SYNERGIES Alexander W. Hooke, Master of Arts, 2008 Directed By: Dr. Jae Kun Shim, Ph.D. Department of Kinesiology Fischell Department of Bioengineering Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program The purpose of this study was to investigate central nervous system strategies for controlling multi-finger forces in three-dimensional (3-D) space ...

The complexity of robotic hands is needed to adapt devices to the many kinds of tasks, but the large number of motors needed to fully actuate the DoFs comes at the cost of size, complexity and weight of devices. A possible approach to solve this problem consists of reducing the number of actuators thus resulting more efficient, simpler and reliable than their fully actuated alternatives. Reduci...