Title:
Robust muscle synergies for postural control

dc.contributor.advisor Ting, Lena H.
dc.contributor.author Torres-Oviedo, Gelsy en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember Chang, Young-Hui
dc.contributor.committeeMember Lee, Robert H.
dc.contributor.committeeMember Nichols, T. Richard
dc.contributor.committeeMember Wolf, Steve L.
dc.contributor.department Biomedical Engineering en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2008-06-10T20:46:05Z
dc.date.available 2008-06-10T20:46:05Z
dc.date.issued 2007-04-09 en_US
dc.description.abstract The musculoskeletal structure of the human and animal body provides multiple solutions for performing any single motor behavior. The long-term goal of the work presented here is to determine the neuromechanical strategies used by the nervous system to appropriately coordinate muscles in order to achieve the performance of daily motor tasks. The overall hypothesis is that the nervous system simplifies muscle coordination by the flexible activation of muscle synergies, defined as a group of muscles activated as a unit, that perform task-level biomechanical functions. To test this hypothesis we investigated whether muscle synergies can be robustly used as building blocks for constructing the spatiotemporal muscle coordination patterns in human and feline postural control under a variety of biomechanical contexts. We demonstrated the generality and robustness of muscle synergies as a simplification strategy for both human and animal postural control. A few robust muscle synergies were able to reproduce the spatial and temporal variability in human and cat postural responses, regardless of stance configuration and perturbation type. In addition inter-trial variability in human postural responses was also accounted for by these muscle synergies. Finally, the activation of each muscle synergy in cat produced a specific stabilizing force vector, suggesting that muscle synergies control task-level variables. The identified muscle synergies may represent general modules of motor output underlying muscle coordination in posture that can be activated in different sensory contexts to achieve different postural goals. Therefore muscle synergies represents a simplifying mechanism for muscle coordination in natural behaviors not only because it is a strategy for reducing the number of variables to be controlled, but because it represents a mechanism for simply controlling multi-segmental task-level variables. en_US
dc.description.degree Ph.D. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/22691
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology en_US
dc.subject EMG en_US
dc.subject Motor control en_US
dc.subject Balance en_US
dc.subject.lcsh Human mechanics
dc.subject.lcsh Kinesiology
dc.subject.lcsh Nervous system
dc.subject.lcsh Biomechanics
dc.subject.lcsh Posture
dc.subject.lcsh Muscles
dc.subject.lcsh Synergetics
dc.title Robust muscle synergies for postural control en_US
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Dissertation
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.advisor Ting, Lena H.
local.contributor.corporatename Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
local.contributor.corporatename College of Engineering
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relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication da59be3c-3d0a-41da-91b9-ebe2ecc83b66
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 7c022d60-21d5-497c-b552-95e489a06569
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