IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2018 Oct;26(10):2033-2043. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2018.2853573. Epub 2018 Jul 5.
Functional electrical stimulation (FES) can be used as a neuroprosthesis in which muscles are stimulated by electrical pulses to compensate for the loss of voluntary movement control. Modulating the stimulation intensities to reliably generate movements is a challenging control problem. This paper introduces a feedback controller for a multi-muscle FES system to control hand movements in a 2-D (table-top) task space. This feedback controller is based on a recent human motor control model, which uses muscle synergies to simplify its calculations and improve the performance. This synergy-based controller employs direct relations between the muscle synergies and the produced hand force, therefore allowing for the real-time calculation of six muscle stimulation levels required to reach an arbitrary target. The experimental results show that this control scheme can perform arbitrary point-to-point reaching tasks in the 2-D task space in real time, with an average of ~2 cm final hand position error from the specified targets. The success of this prototype demonstrates the potential of the proposed method for the feedback control of functional tasks with FES.
功能性电刺激（FES）可用作神经假体，通过电脉冲刺激肌肉来补偿失去的自主运动控制。调制刺激强度以可靠地产生运动是一个具有挑战性的控制问题。本文介绍了一种用于多肌肉 FES 系统的反馈控制器，以控制二维（桌面）任务空间中的手部运动。该反馈控制器基于最近的人类运动控制模型，该模型使用肌肉协同作用来简化其计算并提高性能。基于协同作用的控制器采用肌肉协同作用与产生的手部力之间的直接关系，因此可以实时计算达到任意目标所需的六个肌肉刺激水平。实验结果表明，该控制方案可以实时执行二维任务空间中的任意点对点到达任务，从指定目标的最终手部位置误差平均约为 2 厘米。该原型的成功展示了该方法用于 FES 功能任务反馈控制的潜力。
