Muscle synergy alteration of human during walking with lower limb exoskeleton

Abstract

Muscle synergy reflects inherent coordination patterns of muscle groups as the human body finishes required movements. It may be still unknown whether the original muscle synergy of subjects may alter or not when exoskeletons are put on during their normal walking activities. This paper reports experimental results and presents analysis on muscle synergy from 17 able-bodied subjects with and without lower-limb exoskeletons when they performed normal walking tasks. The electromyography (EMG) signals of the tibialis anterior (TA), soleus (SOL), lateral gastrocnemius (GAS), vastus medialis oblique (VMO), vastus lateralis oblique (VLO), biceps femoris (BICE), semitendinosus (SEMI), and rectus femoris (RECT) muscles were extracted to obtain the muscle synergy. The quantitative results show that, when the subjects wore exoskeletons to walk normally, their mean muscle synergy changed from when they walked without exoskeletons. When the subjects walked with and without exoskeletons, statistically significant differences on sub-patterns of the muscles' synergies between the corresponding two groups could be found.