Abstract
Robot-assisted rehabilitation has emerged as an advantageous tool in the recovery of patients suffering from abnormal motor conditions. The assessment of the electrophysiological behavior of the muscles involved in this rehabilitation process can provide important hints of the patient functional recovery. Such analysis has been commonly performed through the processing of bipolar surface electromyography (sEMG). Here we introduce recent techniques based on the acquisition of high-density electromyography (HD-sEMG) to be used as a tool for the assessment of robot-assisted rehabilitation. To that end, the activity of the tibialis anterior was measured during the performance of periodical ankle dorsiflexion with different frequencies and amplitudes. Intramuscular motor unit coherence was then computed showing peaks at the frequency of movement (delta band) but more interestingly at the beta band. These changes in amplitude and position of the coherence peaks may provide meaningful metrics for gait rehabilitation procedures where the muscle contraction is as well periodical and variable in strength and speed.
This work was partly funded by the ERC Proof-of-Concept Project Interspine (737570).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Westlake, K.P., Patten, C.: Pilot study of lokomat versus manual-assisted treadmill training for locomotor recovery post-stroke. J. Neuroeng. Rehabil. 6(18) (2009)
Chang, W.H., Kim, Y.-H.: Robot-assisted therapy in stroke rehabilitation. J. Stroke 15(3), 174–181 (2013)
Del Vecchio, A., Negro, F., Felici, D., Farina, D.: Distribution of muscle fiber conduction velocity for representative samples of motor units in the full recruitment of the tibialis anterior muscle. Acta Physiol. 222(2), e12930 (2017)
Úbeda, A., Del Vecchio, A., Sartori, M., Puente, S.T., Torres, F., Azorín, J.M., Farina, D.: Electromechanical delay in the tibialis anterior muscle during time-varying ankle dorsiflexion,. In: 2017 International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, ICORR 2017, pp. 68–71 (2017)
van Asseldonk, E.H.F., Campfens, S.F., Verwer, S.J.F., van Putten, M.J.A.M., Stegeman, D.F.: Reliability and agreement of intramuscular coherence in tibialis anterior muscle. PLoS One 9(2), e88428 (2014)
Bravo-Esteban, E., Taylor, J., Aleixandre, M., Simón-Martínez, C., Torricelli, D., Pons, J.L., Avila-Martín, G., Galán-Arriero, I., Gómez-Soriano, J.: Longitudinal estimation of intramuscular tibialis anterior coherence during subacute spinal cord injury: relationship with neurophysiological, functional and clinical outcome measures, J. Neuroeng. Rehabil. 14(58) (2017)
Stegeman, D.F., Kleine, B.U., Lapatki, B.G., Van Dijk, J.P.: High-density surface EMG: techniques and applications at a motor unit level. Biocybern. Biomed. Eng. 32(3), 3–27 (2012)
Del Vecchio, A., Negro, F., Felici, F., Farina, D.: Associations between motor unit action potential parameters and surface EMG features. J. Appl. Physiol. 123(4), 835–843 (2017)
Negro, F., Holobar, A., Farina, D.: Fluctuations in isometric muscle force can be described by one linear projection of low-frequency components of motor unit discharge rates. J. Physiol. 587, 5925–5938 (2009)
Negro, F., Yavuz, U.Ş., Farina, D.: The human motor neuron pools receive a dominant slow-varying common synaptic input. J. Physiol. 594(19), 5491–5505 (2016)
Holobar, A., Minetto, M.A., Farina, D.: Accurate identification of motor unit discharge patterns from high-density surface EMG and validation with a novel signal-based performance metric. J. Neural Eng. 11, 016008 (2014)
Negro, F., Farina, D.: Linear transmission of cortical oscillations to the neural drive to muscles is mediated by common projections to populations of motoneurons in humans. J. Physiol. 589, 629–637 (2011)
Welch, P.: The use of fast fourier transform for the estimation of power spectra: a method based on time averaging over short, modified periodograms, IEEE Trans. Audio Electroacoust., 15(4) (1967)
Gwin, J.T., Ferris, D.P.: Beta- and gamma-range human lower limb corticomuscular coherence. Front. Neurosci. 6, 258 (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Úbeda, A., Del Vecchio, A., Vujaklija, I., Farina, D. (2019). Analysis of Intramuscular Motor Unit Coherence in the Tibialis Anterior Muscle as a Tool for the Assessment of Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation. In: Masia, L., Micera, S., Akay, M., Pons, J. (eds) Converging Clinical and Engineering Research on Neurorehabilitation III. ICNR 2018. Biosystems & Biorobotics, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01845-0_46
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01845-0_46
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01844-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01845-0
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)