Relationship between muscle synergies and skill of the Basketball players

Introduction: "Muscular synergy" is one of the ways to determine the relationship between central nervous system and muscles involved in performing a specific movement. For performing each movement, certain patterns are followed through the central nervous system that control the amount of synergies and these patterns are modified and optimized during the skill.Materials and Methods: The aim of this paper is to classify basketball athlete base on analysis of muscular synergy. After recording the EMG signal from six dominant hand muscles, during the three basketball skills different skill levels, synergy extraction was performed using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method. Then, the cosine similarity feature was extracted, which was applied both separately and with the time and frequency features extracted from the main signal to the neural network in MATLAB software. Results: The result of this classification was obtained by applying the dimensioned reduced matrix of all the existing features with a reliability of 73.68%. Also, the results showed that the cosine similarities between the muscles of each person could lead to the training of the neural network and the classification of individuals at different levels of skill. Conclusion: This study, in comparison to previous studies on EMG signal in athletes, was able to be a new idea which is not yet used in other studies of synergistic features to classify individuals, but with the help of time and frequency features, it only dealt with the difference between the features between at most two groups.