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The Influence of Task Objectives and Loads on the Synergies Governing Human Upper Limb Movements

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Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14268))

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Abstract

The human upper limbs exhibit a multitude of daily functional behaviors, yet these diverse movements arise from a limited set of invariant units—synergistic bases comprising basic motion primitives. However, as human movements necessarily entails interaction with the external environment factors such as task objectives and loads may impact the synergies, thereby compromising the control of the wearable robotics based on those laws. Elucidating the influence of external factors on the synergies governing human upper limb movements presents an urgent yet unresolved challenge. The present study employed principal component analysis (PCA) to identify the distinct synergies for movements associated with differing task objectives. Comparison revealed that, for reaching movements and transferring movements, the factors exerting the greatest impact on synergies are displacement of the distal endpoints and hand grasping. For varied loads, analysis of overall similarity across synergies under different loads revealed how motion synergies changes with increased loads.

S. Wang and X. Zheng—Contributed to the work equally and should be regarded as co-first authors.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (2020YFC2007800) granded to Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52005191).

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Correspondence to Xiufeng Zhang .

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Wang, S., Zheng, X., Zhang, T., Liang, J., Zhang, X. (2023). The Influence of Task Objectives and Loads on the Synergies Governing Human Upper Limb Movements. In: Yang, H., et al. Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14268. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6486-4_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6486-4_38

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-6486-4

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