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BY-NC-ND 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter September 7, 2017

Enhancing the smoothness of joint motion induced by functional electrical stimulation using co-activation strategies

  • Mirjana Ruppel , Christian Klauer EMAIL logo and Thomas Schauer

Abstract

The motor precision of today’s neuroprosthetic devices that use artificial generation of limb motion using Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is generally low. We investigate the adoption of natural co-activation strategies as present in antagonistic muscle pairs aiming to improve motor precision produced by FES. In a test in which artificial knee-joint movements were generated, we could improve the smoothness of FES-induced motion by 513% when applying co-activation during the phases in which torque production is switched between muscles – compared to no co-activation. We further demonstrated how the co-activation level influences the joint stiffness in a pendulum test.

Published Online: 2017-09-07

©2017 Mirjana Ruppel et al., published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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