Sarasola-Sanz Andrea, López-Larraz Eduardo, Irastorza-Landa Nerea, Rossi Giulia, Figueiredo Thiago, McIntyre Joseph, Ramos-Murguialday Ander
Neurotechnology Unit, TECNALIA, Basque Research and Technology Alliance, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain.
Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Front Neurosci. 2022 Mar 11;16:764936. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.764936. eCollection 2022.
Motor learning mediated by motor training has in the past been explored for rehabilitation. Myoelectric interfaces together with exoskeletons allow patients to receive real-time feedback about their muscle activity. However, the number of degrees of freedom that can be simultaneously controlled is limited, which hinders the training of functional tasks and the effectiveness of the rehabilitation therapy. The objective of this study was to develop a myoelectric interface that would allow multi-degree-of-freedom control of an exoskeleton involving arm, wrist and hand joints, with an eye toward rehabilitation. We tested the effectiveness of a myoelectric decoder trained with data from one upper limb and mirrored to control a multi-degree-of-freedom exoskeleton with the opposite upper limb (i.e., mirror myoelectric interface) in 10 healthy participants. We demonstrated successful simultaneous control of multiple upper-limb joints by all participants. We showed evidence that subjects learned the mirror myoelectric model within the span of a five-session experiment, as reflected by a significant decrease in the time to execute trials and in the number of failed trials. These results are the necessary precursor to evaluating if a decoder trained with EMG from the healthy limb could foster learning of natural EMG patterns and lead to motor rehabilitation in stroke patients.
过去，人们探索了通过运动训练介导的运动学习用于康复治疗。肌电接口与外骨骼相结合，使患者能够获得有关其肌肉活动的实时反馈。然而，可以同时控制的自由度数量有限，这阻碍了功能任务的训练以及康复治疗的效果。本研究的目的是开发一种肌电接口，以实现对涉及手臂、手腕和手部关节的外骨骼进行多自由度控制，着眼于康复治疗。我们在10名健康参与者中测试了一种肌电解码器的有效性，该解码器使用来自一侧上肢的数据进行训练，并镜像用于控制另一侧上肢的多自由度外骨骼（即镜像肌电接口）。我们证明了所有参与者都成功地同时控制了多个上肢关节。我们有证据表明，受试者在五节实验的过程中学会了镜像肌电模型，这体现在执行试验的时间和失败试验的数量显著减少。这些结果是评估用健康肢体的肌电图训练的解码器是否能够促进自然肌电图模式的学习并导致中风患者运动康复的必要前提。
