TY - JOUR
T1 - Muscle synergy features in behavior adaptation and recovery
AU - Alnajjar, Fady S.
AU - Berenz, Vincent
AU - Ken-Ichi, Ozaki
AU - Ohno, Kensuke
AU - Yamada, Hitoshi
AU - Kondo, Izumi
AU - Shimoda, Shingo
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgment. This work was done under the support of Toyota Motor Co. We are very grateful for their technical and financial assistance.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Muscle synergy is the neuromuscular strategy that allows the central nervous system (CNS) to deal with muscle redundancy. In muscle synergy, muscles which are activated in asynchrony, when performing particular movement, are grouped and controlled by low-dimension motor signal. The relationship between the neuromuscular strategy for behavioral adaptation to unfamiliar task in healthy human and recovering motor function after stroke is still unclear. Here we investigated the behavioral adaptation of six healthy participants who were introduced to unfamiliar task and we compared their resulting synergies with those observed from three stroke survivors throughout their recovery process. Our results revealed that the dimension of the resulting synergies of the healthy participants when introduced to an unfamiliar task was initially lower than the original; causing a restriction in the range of the joint motions and resulting in abnormal movements. The synergy dimension in those participants was gradually adjusted through behavior training. Interestingly, similar synergy patterns were also observed in cortical stroke survivors. This similarity in adaptation could be used to enhance the regular post-stroke therapeutic approaches by providing opportunities of testing various training protocols in healthy subjects before carrying only the efficient ones to the post-stroke patients.
AB - Muscle synergy is the neuromuscular strategy that allows the central nervous system (CNS) to deal with muscle redundancy. In muscle synergy, muscles which are activated in asynchrony, when performing particular movement, are grouped and controlled by low-dimension motor signal. The relationship between the neuromuscular strategy for behavioral adaptation to unfamiliar task in healthy human and recovering motor function after stroke is still unclear. Here we investigated the behavioral adaptation of six healthy participants who were introduced to unfamiliar task and we compared their resulting synergies with those observed from three stroke survivors throughout their recovery process. Our results revealed that the dimension of the resulting synergies of the healthy participants when introduced to an unfamiliar task was initially lower than the original; causing a restriction in the range of the joint motions and resulting in abnormal movements. The synergy dimension in those participants was gradually adjusted through behavior training. Interestingly, similar synergy patterns were also observed in cortical stroke survivors. This similarity in adaptation could be used to enhance the regular post-stroke therapeutic approaches by providing opportunities of testing various training protocols in healthy subjects before carrying only the efficient ones to the post-stroke patients.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-08072-7_43
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-08072-7_43
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85037687511
SN - 2195-3562
VL - 7
SP - 245
EP - 253
JO - Biosystems and Biorobotics
JF - Biosystems and Biorobotics
ER -