Human Muscle Synergy Analysis to Approach the Understanding of Brain Control Algorithm

Muscle synergy is a functional unit that coordinates the activity of a number of muscles. In this study, the extraction of muscle synergies in three types of hand movements in the horizontal plane is investigated.

So, after constructing the tracking pattern of three signals, by LabVIEW, the Electromyography (EMG) signal from six muscles of hand was recorded. Then time-constant muscle synergies and their activity curves from the recorded EMG signals were extracted using Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) method.

Comparison of these patterns showed that the non-random motions’ synergies were more similar than the random motions among different individuals. It was observed that in all movements, the similarity of the synergies in one cluster was greater than the similarity of their corresponding activation curves.

The results showed that the complexity of the recurrence plot in random movement is greater than that of the other movements.