The present study deals with stabilizing aspects of a hand-held dish filled with liquid while walking steadily. This is an attempt to decipher the neuro-muscular strategies employed and the mechanical responses of the arm during certain tasks of manual materials handling. The experimental configuration included a cup and the test-subject’s hand as an ‘end-effector’ of a serial three-link system representing the upper limb. These links are connected together by the wrist, elbow and shoulder joints. The tested subjects walked at constant speed on a treadmill while aiming to minimize liquid spillage from the cup. The motion of the limb and shoulder girdle served as inputs to a model to reveal the impedance adjustments during the simultaneous control of grasping and walking under ordinary conditions, and when one of the joints is affected. A regressive function used to express stiffness, included first-order dependence on angle and on angular velocity. The function used for damping included first-order dependence on angular velocity. Redundancies in the numerical solution were eliminated using multicollinearity diagnostic algorithms. The results revealed that the wrist joint was found to have constant stiffness and damping and no regulation of these coefficients was necessary during gait. Both in the elbow and shoulder joints stiffness included a constant coefficient as well as an angular velocity-dependent coefficient. Although all tested subjects demonstrated ability to prevent spillage of liquid, there was a considerable variability among the results obtained, indicating that the compensatory mechanisms employed by each subject to regulate the mechanical impedance were subjective. These results can help in the optimization of manual materials handeling tasks in industrial settings as well as future design of prosthetic arms, robotic appliances and man machine interfacing devices.
The functional activation, through electrical stimulation, of the lower limb consisting of several deficient muscles requires well-patterned and coordinated activation of these muscles. This study presents a method for characterizing the parameters of the major muscle groups controlling the ankle and knee joints in cycling motion, the latter having particular significance in the rehabilitation of locomotion. To lower mechanical indeterminacy in the joints the system is reduced by grouping the muscles acting in synergism. The joint torques were calculated by inverse dynamics methods from cycling motion data, including kinematics and foot/pedal reaction loads (forces, moments). The mechanical indeterminacy was resolved by applying optimization criteria and the individual muscle torques were parceled-out from the joint torques. System identification of the individual muscles, part of which being bi-articular, in this non-isometric condition was performed from the relationship between the evaluated force and the measured EMG of each the muscles, using both first and second order linear transfer functions. Feasibility of the presented method was demonstrated through the computation of the coefficients of the muscles involved and validating the results on the experimental data obtained from one subject.
The functional activation, through electrical stimulation, of the lower limb consisting of several deficient muscles requires well-patterned and coordinated activation of these muscles. This study presents a method for characterizing the parameters of the major muscle groups controlling the ankle and knee joints in cycling motion, the latter having particular significance in the rehabilitation of locomotion. To lower mechanical indeterminacy in the joints the system is reduced by grouping the muscles acting in synergism. The joint torques were calculated by inverse dynamics methods from cycling motion data, including kinematics and foot/pedal reaction loads (forces, moments). The mechanical indeterminacy was resolved by applying optimization criteria and the individual muscle torques were parceled-out from the joint torques. System identification of the individual muscles, part of which being bi-articular, in this non-isometric condition was performed from the relationship between the evaluated force and the measured EMG of each the muscles, using both first and second order linear transfer functions. Feasibility of the presented method was demonstrated through the computation of the coefficients of the muscles involved and validating the results on the experimental data obtained from one subject.
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