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A Study on the Relationship Between Muscle, Kinematics, and Kinetic Synergies During Human Gait

Darvishi, Mahziyar | 2022

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 55953 (08)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Mechanical Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Farahmand, Farzam
  7. Abstract:
  8. Human body movements are achieved by activating a number of muscles. It has been shown that the central nervous system (CNS) plays the main role in controlling rhythmic activities (including walking, chewing, etc.). However, the way the central nervous system works in controlling different parts of the body has always been discussed due to the excess degrees of freedom to perform certain tasks. Controlling a group of muscles (under the name of muscle synergy analysis) instead of each one of them has been one of the most attractive and efficient recent ideas to better understand the CNS function. Also, a similar concept can be expressed for kinematic synergies (by the degrees of freedom of the joints) and kinetics (by the torque components and force of the end limb). So far, many studies have focused on the applications of synergy in various industries, including robotics, medicine, sports, etc., but their functionality is still questioned. The purpose of this thesis is a comprehensive study of muscle and kinematic synergies (including joint angles, angular velocities, and angular accelerations) and their relationship with each other, as well as their relationship with ground reaction forces. Therefore, first, muscle synergies during seven movements in two different families of movements were extracted using the NNMF method, and by clustering the results with three stages of K-means clustering, it was determined that different movements include common and specific muscle synergies and different movements take place by the activation of mentioned structures at different times. Next, a similar analysis was done on the kinematic data and similar results were obtained for this group of synergies. Then, by examining one-to-one relationship between muscle and kinematics synergies from the point of view of activation profiles, it was observed that to some extent one-to-one relationship can be found between these two categories of synergy. In the continuation of the work, by pooling muscle data with kinematics (including angular positions, velocity, and acceleration) and then implementing the NNMF algorithm, it was observed that each synergistic structure obtained can represent a subphase of the gait movement cycle. At the end, by examining the relationship between muscle synergies and end limb forces, it was found that probably one of the synergies is responsible for applying force in the bottom-up direction. Since none of the articles investigated the relationship between muscle synergies, kinematics (angles, angular velocities, and angular accelerations), as well as their relationship with ground reaction forces during all types of human movements, this comprehensive review can be of special attention. Also, finding this relationship can be very effective in better understanding the function and concept of synergies, as well as helping to clarify the path of research in the field of rehabilitation to patients with neurological or orthopedics disabilities. Also, making neural prostheses for patients with neurological disabilities is one of the other applications that a better understanding of the concept of synergies can provide us
  9. Keywords:
  10. Electromyography ; Muscle Synergy ; Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) ; Gait Analysis ; Central Nervious System ; Kinematic Synergy ; Ground Reaction Force (GRF)

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