Author's School

School of Engineering & Applied Science

Author's Department/Program

Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science

Language

English (en)

Date of Award

Winter 12-1-2013

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Chair and Committee

David Peters

Abstract

Motor coordination can be described by the activation of a few intermuscular coordination patterns, or muscle synergies. Muscle synergy can be defined as a relatively fixed pattern of activation across a set of muscles. The neural mechanisms underlying muscle synergies remain to be fairly unknown. Through a muscle synergy study [13], co-activation in muscle pairs was discovered through a non-negative matrix factorization: NMF) analysis. In order to evaluate the same muscles under the frequency domain, coherence analysis: a correlational method) was used. Additionally, a comparison can be made to determine if the resulting muscle pairs overlap with the muscle pairs found through the synergy analysis. Using coherence analysis, it was evaluated whether muscle members co-activated within a muscle synergy are correlated in the frequency domain, suggesting a common fixed drive in the central nervous system.

Comments

Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K7H41PHN

Share

COinS