Feasibility of inducing new intermuscular coordination patterns through an electromyographic signal-guided training in the upper extremity: a pilot study

Motor Modules Are Largely Unaffected by Pathological Walking Biomechanics: A Simulation Study

“…The motor modules extracted from the full muscle set in the reference simulation (i.e., "normal" walking biomechanics) (Fig. 5) were similar to those identified in other studies in which there were modules with dominant activity from: (1) hip/knee extensors in early stance, (2) ankle plantar flexors in late stance, (3) hip flexors and hamstrings from late stance into swing, and (4) ankle dorsiflexors in late swing into early stance [24][25][26]63,64]. Likely due to the absence of hip flexor musculature, motor module 3 was absent from the experimental subset.…”

“…It is hypothesized that motor modules reflect an underlying nervous system strategy to overcome the complexity of controlling movement by grouping muscles into functional units. As such, many researchers are using motor modules to evaluate the effect of different rehabilitation interventions on neuromuscular control [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and even to control exoskeletons and prosthetic devices [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. However, since motor modules are identified from experimentallyrecorded electromyography (EMG) using numerical decomposition techniques such as principal component analysis or non-negative matrix factorization [1,22,23], there is ongoing debate regarding whether they truly represent an underlying neural strategy or simply emerge from the biomechanics of the recorded movement.…”