STUDY OF KINEMATICAL SYNERGY OF THE ARM JOINTS FOR FES CONTROL OF REACHING MOVEMENTS IN A PLANE

Patients with spinal cord injury in C5/C6 levels are capable of controlling the voluntary movements of the shoulder joints, but some muscles involved in movement of the elbow joint are paralyzed. By using FES, as well as an appropriate stimulation of paralyzed muscles, these patients can be assisted with their essential daily living activities. One of the major problems of using FES for reanimation of paralyzed arm is to provide voluntary commands for FES control. In this paper, the feasibility of using synergy has been investigated. The kinematical data of four basic arm movements have been recorded and pre-processed. Afterwards, synergy was implemented in a hierarchical architecture using machine-learning techniques (inductive learning and neural networks). Cross correlation between the learned and recorded trajectories is above 99% over all recordings that confirms the performance of the proposed method.