Alternating stimulation of synergistic muscles during functional electrical stimulation cycling improves endurance in persons with spinal cord injury

Motor unit recruitment during neuromuscular electrical stimulation: a critical appraisal

“…Voluntary muscle contractions also diVer from typical electrically stimulated contractions by their increased variability in motor unit discharge, motivating the investigation of electrical stimulation patterns with varying frequency, amplitude, and pulse width (Thomas et al 2002;Graham et al 2006;Chou and Binder-Macleod 2007;Indurthy and GriYn 2007). Additionally, task endurance may also be improved by alternately stimulating muscle synergists, thus allowing individual muscles longer rest periods while still producing desired joint torques (Decker et al 2010). However, to this point, these strategies have neither consistently improved fatigue resistance nor been incorporated into clinical applications.…”

Torque and mechanomyogram relationships during electrically-evoked isometric quadriceps contractions in persons with spinal cord injury

“…Previous studies [4,20,36,42,45] have demonstrated strong positive linear or non-linear correlations between MMG signal parameters and stimulus-evoked isometric torque in healthy persons. To our knowledge, only a single investigation [51] has utilized MMG amplitude to quantify NMES-evoked contraction levels (as related to cycling ride time) in quadriceps muscle in persons with SCI. However, the present study has uniquely investigated the relationship between MMG amplitude and NMESevoked isometric torque at submaximal-to-maximal contraction intensities in order to infer characteristics about torque production in a SCI population.…”

Low-intensity functional electrical stimulation can increase multidirectional trunk stiffness in able-bodied individuals during sitting

“…First, measuring the muscle activity of the stimulated muscles via mechanomyography [40] would have allowed us to monitor whether neurally regulated muscle contractions in response to the perturbations are affected by low-intensity FES. Second, stimulating lateral abdominal muscles (such as the external obliques) in addition to the rectus abdominis and erector spinae muscles would have provided, in terms of statistical significance, a more complete picture of the effect of low-intensity FES on multidirectional trunk stiffness.…”