Infinite Biomedical Technologies, Baltimore, MD21218, USA.
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2013 Mar;60(3):792-802. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2012.2185494. Epub 2012 Jan 23.
C5/C6 tetraplegic patients and transhumeral amputees may be able to use voluntary shoulder motion as command signals for a functional electrical stimulation system or transhumeral prosthesis. Stereotyped relationships, termed "postural synergies," among the shoulder, forearm, and wrist joints emerge during goal-oriented reaching and transport movements as performed by able-bodied subjects. Thus, the posture of the shoulder can potentially be used to infer the desired posture of the elbow and forearm joints during reaching and transporting movements. We investigated how well able-bodied subjects could learn to use a noninvasive command scheme based on inferences from these postural synergies to control a simulated transhumeral prosthesis in a virtual reality task. We compared the performance of subjects using the inferential command scheme (ICS) with subjects operating the simulated prosthesis in virtual reality according to complete motion tracking of their actual arm and hand movements. Initially, subjects performed poorly with the ICS but improved rapidly with modest amounts of practice, eventually achieving performance only slightly less than subjects using complete motion tracking. Thus, inferring the desired movement of distal joints from voluntary shoulder movements appears to be an intuitive and noninvasive approach for obtaining command signals for prostheses to restore reaching and grasping functions.
C5/C6 四肢瘫痪患者和肱骨截肢患者可能能够使用自愿的肩部运动作为功能性电刺激系统或肱骨假肢的命令信号。在有能力的受试者进行的目标导向的伸展和运输运动中，肩部、前臂和腕关节之间出现了称为“姿势协同”的刻板关系。因此，肩部的姿势有可能被用来推断伸展和运输运动期间肘部和前臂关节的期望姿势。我们研究了健康受试者能够学习使用基于这些姿势协同推断的非侵入性命令方案来控制虚拟现实任务中的模拟肱骨假肢的程度。我们比较了使用推断命令方案 (ICS) 的受试者的表现与根据实际手臂和手部运动的完整运动跟踪在虚拟现实中操作模拟假肢的受试者的表现。最初，受试者使用 ICS 的表现很差，但经过适度的练习后迅速提高，最终的表现仅略低于使用完整运动跟踪的受试者。因此，从自愿的肩部运动推断出远端关节的期望运动，对于获得用于恢复伸展和抓握功能的假肢的命令信号，似乎是一种直观和非侵入性的方法。
