The concept of synergy, denoting the coordination of multiple elements working together toward a common goal, has been extensively studied to understand how the central nervous system (CNS) controls movement (for review see [5,9]). Although this definition is appealing in its simplicity, ‘multiple elements’, ‘working together’, and ‘common goal’ each take different meanings depending on the sca...

The recent developments of a particular approach to analyzing motor synergies based on the principle of motor abundance has allowed a quantitative assessment of multi-effector coordination in motor tasks involving anticipatory adjustments to self-triggered postural perturbations and in voluntary postural sway. This approach, the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) hypothesis, is based on an assumption ...

In this paper, it is investigated how a robot hand can be controlled from a human motion and an EMG signal in a tele-operation system. The proposed method uses a tensor to represent a multi-factor model relevant to different individuals and motions in multiple dimensions. Therefore, the synergies extracted by the proposed algorithm can account for not only various grasping motions but also the ...

We present a method for real-time bare hand tracking that utilizes natural hand synergies to reduce the complexity and improve the plausibility of the hand posture estimation. The hand pose and posture are estimated by fitting a virtual hand model to the 3D point cloud obtained from a Kinect camera using an inverse kinematics approach. We use real human hand movements captured with a Vicon moti...

In this study we investigated redundancy control in joint action. Ten participantpairs (dyads) performed a virtual lifting task in which isometric forces needed to be generated with two or four hands. The participants were not allowed to communicate but received continuous visual feedback of their performance. When the task had to be performed with four hands, participants were confronted with ...

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether subjects who have learned a complex motor skill exhibit similar neuromuscular control strategies. We studied a population of experienced gymnasts during backward giant swings on the high bar. This cyclic movement is interesting because it requires learning, as untrained subjects are unable to perform this task. Nine gymnasts were tested....

The cube of opposition is a logical structure that underlies many information representation settings. When applied to multiple criteria decision, it displays various possible aggregation attitudes. Situations are usually assessed by combinations of properties they satisfy, but also by combinations of properties they do not satisfy. The cube of opposition applies to qualitative evaluation when ...

Muscle synergies have been proposed as a mechanism to simplify movement control. Whether these coactivation patterns have any physiological reality within the nervous system remains unknown. Here we applied electrical microstimulation to motor cortical areas of rhesus macaques to evoke hand movements. Movements tended to converge toward particular postures, driven by synchronous bursts of muscl...