Functional Electrical Stimulation Controller Based on Muscle Synergies

The use of hybrid exoskeletons has emerged as an alternative for compensation or rehabilitation of people who suffered cerebrovascular accidents (CVA) or a spinal cord injury (SCI). The efficiency of the system comes from the combination of robotic orthosis and motor neuroprosthetic devices in order to drive a rehabilitation process to treat these conditions. Over the last year, muscle synergies were identified as basis, natural and simpler neuromotor control paradigm. The use of this theory in rehabilitation is not yet clear. This paper presents a FES controller based on synergies as a tool to explore and validate this novel neuromotor control approach in neurorobotics and neuroprosthetics.