Abstract
During multi-finger force-production tasks, finger forces can be generated without the involvement of neural commands which called the enslaving effect. In addition, the force produced by a given finger in a multi-finger task is smaller than the force generated by this finger in its single-finger maximal force-production task which called the force deficit effect. The purposes of this study were to represent quantitatively both the enslaving effect and the force deficit effect and propose the relationship between the finger force and the neural command by the experimental results. Seven subjects were instructed to press one, two, three and four fingers on the finger sensors as hard as possible acting in parallel in all possible combinations. The results confirmed that the finger forces were generated without the neural commands up to 20% of their maximal forces as the enslaving effect. In addition, the force deficit effect increased with the number of fingers involved. The mathematical model proposed in this paper could explicitly describe the two effects of finger interaction. The present results could be useful information to understand the basic neuro-muscular mechanism in hand biomechanics and the fundamentals of intelligent hand robots.
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