Assessment of muscular activation patterns in 3d upper limb robot-aided rehabilitation

Abstract

Diseases affecting human sensorimotor system are usually characterized by abnormal patterns of muscle activation. Therefore, their monitoring can evaluate and improve motor recovery. In developing new platforms for robot-aided rehabilitation, it is fundamental to understand if the platform itself negatively influence muscular patterns. This paper aims at verifying if a new developed end-effector robotic platform provided with an arm support and based on an assistance-as-needed approach alters patients movements in terms of muscle synergies. Preliminary tests have been carried out on eight healthy subjects performing 16 point-to-point movements. Muscular synergies have been extracted using the non-negative matrix factorization algorithm. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed platform does not produce significant variations in muscular activation patterns (p>0.05).