A hybrid functional electrical stimulation for real-time estimation of joint torque and closed-loop control of muscle activation

Abstract

As a neuroprosthetic technique, functional electrical stimulation (FES) can restore lost motor performance of impaired patients. Through delivering electrical pulses to target muscles, the joint movement can be eventually elicited. This work presents a real-time FES system which is able to deal with two neuroprosthetic missions: one is estimating FES-induced joint torque with evoked electromyograph (eEMG), and the other is artificially controlling muscle activation with such eEMG feedback. The clinical experiment results on spinal cord injured (SCI) patients and healthy subjects show promising performance of the proposed FES system.