Sharif Digital Repository

Study Design. A cross-sectional study to quantify trunk motor control during multidirectional isometric tracking tasks.Objective. To investigate the effect of chronic low back pain (LBP) on trunk neuromuscular performance while participants performed isometric exertions of trunk muscles to track targets in different angles with various magnitudes.Summary of Background Data. Tracking tasks especially in multidirectional activities are among the common research methods to quantify human motor control in different conditions. However, little information is available on trunk motor control during these tasks. There is no study investigating trunk accuracy during multidirectional isometric... 

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: It is suggested that activation of the transverse abdominis muscle has a stabilizing effect on the lumbar spine by raising intra-abdominal pressure without added disc compression. However, its feedforward activity has remained a controversial issue. In addition, research regarding bilateral activation of trunk muscles during a unilateral arm movement is limited. The aim of this study was to evaluate bilateral anticipatory activity of trunk muscles during unilateral arm flexion.MATERIALS AND METHODS: Eighteen healthy subjects (aged 25 ± 3.96 years) participated in this study and performed 10 trials of rapid arm flexion in response to a visual stimulus. The... 

Although permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) are inherently of high efficiency, their efficiency is enormously dependent on their control strategy. The purpose of this paper is to improve the efficiency of PMSMs under a direct torque control (DTC) method. The main idea behind the proposed method is to predict a required small change of the statorflux amplitude at each sampling period to reduce the machine electrical loss before the change is applied. Accordingly, at every sampling time, a voltage vector is predicted and applied to the machine to change the flux amplitude in a xvay that the electrical loss decreases. The results of simulation show significant improvement in the... 

This paper deals with the efficiency optimization of Field Oriented Control (FOC) of a six-Phase Induction Motor (6PIM) by adaptive flux search control. The six-phase induction motor is supplied by Space Vector PWM (SVPWM) and voltage source inverter. Adaptive flux search controller is fast than ordinary search control technique and easy to implement. Adaptive flux Search Control (SC) technique decreases the convergence time by proper change of flux variation steps and increases accuracy of the SC technique. A proper loss model of 6PIM in conjunction with the proposed method is used. The six-phase induction machine has large zero sequence harmonic currents that can be reduced by SVPWM... 

It has been suggested that the central nervous system simplifies muscle control through basic units, called synergies. In this study, we have developed a novel target-matching protocol and used non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) technique to extract trunk muscle synergies and corresponding torque synergies. Isometric torque data at the L5/S1 level and electromyographic patterns of twelve abdominal and back muscles from twelve healthy participants (five females) were simultaneously recorded. Each participant performed a total number of 24 isometric target-matching tasks using 12 different angular directions and 2 levels of uniaxial and biaxial exertions. Within- and between-subject... 

The role of motor control in development of low back pain is subject of many researches both in theoretical and experimental fields. In this work flexion-extension movement of lumbar spine have been controlled by three different methods, including feedback linearization (FBL), PD control and their combinations. The model involves 7 links: 1 link for pelvis, 5 links for lumbar vertebrae and 1 link for trunk. Torque actuators have been used on each joint to make them follow desired trajectory. In linear control method, equations of motion have been linearized with respect to upright position and then control signals have been applied in the direction of eigenvectors. Robustness of each method... 

Knowledge about the non-linear dynamical pattern of postural sway may provide important insights into the adaptability (flexibility) of human postural control in response to everyday stresses imposed on the body. A commonly used non-linear tool, i.e. recurrence quantification analysis, was chosen to investigate the effect of prior anterior cruciate ligament injury on the deterministic pattern of postural sway under different conditions of postural and cognitive difficulty. In double leg stance, as postural difficulty increased from open-eyes to closed-eyes and rigid-surface to foam-surface, the centre of pressure regularity (%determinism) increased as well. In comparison to healthy... 

A hallmark of more advanced models is their higher details of trunk muscles represented by a larger number of muscles. The question is if in reality we control these muscles individually as independent agents or we control groups of them called "synergy". To address this, we employed a 3-D biomechanical model of the spine with 18 trunk muscles that satisfied equilibrium conditions at L4/5, with different cost functions. The solutions of several 2-D and 3-D tasks were arranged in a data matrix and the synergies were computed by using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms. Variance accounted for (VAF) was used to evaluate the number of synergies that emerged by the analysis, which... 

Background Motor control exercise was claimed to improve spinal stability in patients with chronic non-specific back pain, but to investigate the effectiveness of this exercise, other outcome measures have been used rather than spinal stability itself. The aim of our study is to assess motor control exercise effects on spinal stability using a biomechanical model. Methods Fifty-one patients were assigned to either motor control or general exercises. Before and after trainings, participants were tested for spinal stability at seven isometric tasks. Electromyography signals were recorded from ten superficial muscles, and a hybrid EMG-driven musculoskeletal model estimated spinal stability... 

Inter-segmental coordination can be influenced by chronic low back pain (CLBP). The sagittal plane lower extremities inter-segmental coordination pattern and variability, in conjunction with the pelvis and trunk, were assessed in subjects with and without non-specific CLBP during free-speed walking. Kinematic data were collected from 10 non-specific CLBP and 10 non-CLBP control volunteers while the subjects were walking at their preferred speed. Sagittal plane time-normalized segmental angles and velocities were used to calculate continuous relative phase for each data point. Mean absolute relative phase (MARP) and deviation phase (DP) were derived to quantify the trunk-pelvis and bilateral... 

This paper introduces an incremental local learning algorithm inspired by learning in neurobiological systems. This algorithm has no training phase and learns the world during operation, in a lifetime manner. It is a semi-supervised algorithm which combines soft competitive learning in input space and linear regression with recursive update in output space. This method is also robust to negative interference and compromises bias-variance dilemma. These qualities make the learning method a good nonlinear function approximator having possible applications in neuro-robotic systems. Some simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in function approximation, time-series... 

In this study the properties of muscle synergies, arising from optimal feedback control are investigated. Three different tasks namely reaching, via-point, and hitting are performed using optimization of corresponding cost functions. Then by applying non-negative matrix factorization method to a dataset of muscle tensions, synchronous muscle synergies are obtained. In this way, different muscle patterns can be generated by linear combination of these basis vectors with non-negative time-varying scaling coefficients. According to our simulations some of obtained muscle synergies are shared between tasks and some of them are specific for one task. This finding is also in agreement with the... 

Background: A few clinical trials have examined the effect of treatment interventions on postural control in patients with chronic low back pain, all of which have exclusively evaluated postural stability using traditional linear measures of postural sway. However, postural control improvement cannot be determined by exclusively relying on linear measurements, because these parameters provide no information on underlying motor control mechanisms. Objective: This study aimed to compare the effect of using lumbosacral orthoses (LSO) together with routine physical therapy, compared to routine physical therapy alone on postural control, using nonlinear analysis techniques. Methods: Forty-four... 

Objectives: To investigate the effects of competitive and noncompetitive volleyball exercises on the functional performance and motor control of the upper limbs in chronic stroke survivors. Design: Randomized clinical trial. Setting: Outpatient rehabilitation center. Participants: Chronic stroke survivors (N=48). Interventions: Participants were randomly assigned to competitive (n=16) or noncompetitive (n=16) volleyball exercise groups (60min/d volleyball exercise+30min/d traditional rehabilitation, 3d/wk for 7wk) and control group (n=16). Main Outcome Measures: Reach and grasp motor control measures were evaluated through kinematic analysis. Functional outcomes were assessed via Motor... 

Background: Lower limb amputation is a major public health issue globally, and its prevalence is increasing significantly around the world. Previous studies on lower limb amputees showed analogous complexity implemented by the neurological system which does not depend on the level of amputation. Research question: What are the differences in muscle synergies between healthy subjects (HS) and transfemoral amputees (TFA) during self-selected normal transient-state walking speed? Methods: thirteen male HS and eleven male TFA participated in this study. Surface electromyography (sEMG) data were collected from HS dominant leg and TFA intact limb. Concatenated non-negative matrix factorization... 

Permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drives have many advantages over other drives, e.g. high efficiency and high power density. Particularly, permanent magnet synchronous motors are epoch-making and are intensively studied among researchers, scientists and engineers. This paper deals with a novel high performance controller based on genetic algorithm. The scheme allows the motor to be driven with maximum torque per ampere characteristic. In this paper assuming an appropriate fitness function, the optimum values for d-axis current of motor set points at each time are found and then applied to the controller. Simulation results show the successful operation of the proposed controller. ©... 

Modeling the spine behavior plays a key role in understanding mechanisms leading to spinal disorders and injuries. The goal of this article is to develop a new model to obtain 3D spine movement patterns. High degrees of freedom of the system, a great many of muscles involved in the spine movements and its unstable intrinsic behavior make the control problem more difficult. New theories in computational motor control suggest optimal control as a useful tool for modeling Central Nervous System (CNS) to provide appropriate control signals while it computes the neural interactions with biological sensors. Therefore, CNS is modeled as an optimal controller. Our simulations illustrate the movement... 

Cerebellum has been assumed as an array of adjustable pattern generators (APGs). In recent years, electrophysiological researches have suggested the existence of modular structures in spinal cord called motor primitives. In our proposed model, each "adjustable primitive pattern generator" (APPG) module in the cerebellum is consisted of a large number of parallel APGs, the output of each module being the weighted sum of the outputs of these APGs. Each spinal field is tuned by a coefficient, representing a descending supraspinal command, which is modulated by ith APPG correspondingly. According to this model, motor control can be interpreted in terms of the modification of these coefficients....