Muscle coordination analysis by time-varying muscle synergy extraction during cycling across various mechanical conditions

Abstract

Central nervous system (CNS) uses the combination of a small number of motor primitives, named muscle synergies, for simplification of motor control in human movement. The aim of this study was to investigate the muscle coordination in both leg muscles during pedaling by time-varying muscle synergy extraction. Twenty healthy subjects performed three 6-min cycling tasks over a range of rotational speed (40, 50, and 60 rpm) and resistant torque (3, 5, and 7 N/M). Surface electromyography signals were recorded during pedaling from eight muscles of the right and left lower limbs.We extracted four time-varying muscle synergies from sEMG patterns. Mean and standard deviation of the quality of the signal reconstruction (R2) for all subjects was obtained 0.9328 ± 0.0120. We investigated the similarity of muscle synergies during cycling across various mechanical conditions. We found the high degrees of similarity (>0.85) among the sets of time-varying muscle synergies across mechanical conditions and also across subjects. Our results show that the same motor control strategies for cycling are used by all subjects in various mechanical conditions.