Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

The applicants share strong research interests and activities directed toward understanding the underlying cognitive, neural and physical mechanisms of human movement, and in transferring the acquired knowledge to develop novel products and services in areas including, but not limited to, manufacturing, education, healthcare, and sports. Although our research programs in these areas have made tremendous progresses in the past years, we have reached a threshold where a new research tool is imperative. Human movement is the result of an interaction among complex neural and physical processes. However, we only have tools that allow us to investigate one of these processes at a time, either neurophysiological or biomechanical. Consequently, we are largely blind to the other closely linked processes integral to the movements under investigation. As a result, the outputs of our research are isolated and fragmented, which is incomplete, biased and can even be erroneous. To address this problem, we propose to build an integrated measurement system for human movement that incorporates the following sensor modalities: a high-density electromyographic (HD-EMG) amplifier to measure electric activities of the smallest functional units of muscles, motor units (MU); and a state-of-the-art dynamometer to measure joint torque during static and dynamic contractions. This system, integrated with these two measurement modalities, will allow us to analyze inter-linked neural and physical processes of human movement in a systematic and biofidelic manner, as it simultaneously captures the chain of processes underlying human movement from the actuators, i.e. the bursting patterns of the MUs within a muscle and among synergistic muscle group (HD-EMG), to the end-effectors i.e. the torque, velocity produced at different joints and forces at the upper and lower extremities. Further, the system is capable of measuring these signals during both static and dynamic contractions, in a repeatable and consistent manner. In summary, the proposed system is essential and imperative to the establishment of an integrated research platform for human movement analysis, with unprecedented capability. It is estimated that more than 50 HQP will use the system in their training and research over the next 5 years, and more for years to come.