Finding muscle activity generating a given motion is a redundant problem, since there are many more muscles than degrees of freedom. The control strategies determining muscle recruitment from a redundant set are still poorly understood. One theory of motor control suggests that motion is produced through activating a small number of muscle synergies, i.e., muscle groups that are activated in a ...

Previous studies using advanced matrix factorization techniques have shown that the coordination of human voluntary limb movements may be accomplished using combinations of a small number of intermuscular coordination patterns, or muscle synergies. However, the potential use of muscle synergies for isometric force generation has been evaluated mostly using correlational methods. The results of ...

Neurology shows that human controls dozens of muscles for hand poses in a coordinated manner and such coordination is referred as to a postural synergy. The concept of postural synergies was recently adopted in the control of robotic hands. With the synergies implemented digitally in a controller, all the motors in an anthropomorphic robotic hand can be controlled via a few synergy inputs. Aimi...

Whether the nervous system relies on modularity to simplify acquisition and control of complex motor skills remains controversial. To date, evidence for modularity has been indirect, based on statistical regularities in the motor commands captured by muscle synergies. Here we provide direct evidence by testing the prediction that in a truly modular controller it must be harder to adapt to pertu...

It has been suggested that the motor system may circumvent the difficulty of controlling many degrees of freedom in the musculoskeletal apparatus by generating motor outputs through a combination of discrete muscle synergies. How a discretely organized motor system compensates for diverse perturbations has remained elusive. Here, we investigate whether motor responses observed after an inertial...

The musculoskeletal redundancy of the body provides multiple solutions for performing motor tasks. We have proposed that the nervous system solves this unconstrained problem through the recruitment of motor modules or functional muscle synergies that map motor intention to action. Consistent with this hypothesis, we showed that trial-by-trial variations in muscle activation for multidirectional...

23 We compared the activity profiles and synergies of spinal motoneurons recorded during 24 fictive locomotion evoked in immobilized decerebrate cat preparations by midbrain stimulation 25 to the activity profiles and synergies of the corresponding hindlimb muscles obtained during 26 forward level walking in cats. The fictive locomotion data were collected in the Spinal Cord 27 Research Centre,...

Knee joint stability is crucial in human daily activity; however, it is unclear how the central nervous system uses muscle redundancies to create stability. Muscle synergy may be a means by which this control is simplified. These synergies can be extracted using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). The outputs of this method are finite basis synergies and weight coefficients. We address two...