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Estimation of muscular forces from SSA smoothed sEMG signals calibrated by inverse dynamics-based physiological static optimization

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Abstract

The estimation of muscular forces is useful in several areas such as biomedical or rehabilitation engineering. As muscular forces cannot be measured in vivo non-invasively they must be estimated by using indirect measurements such as surface electromyography (sEMG) signals or by means of inverse dynamic (ID) analyses. This paper proposes an approach to estimate muscular forces based on both of them. The main idea is to tune a gain matrix so as to compute muscular forces from sEMG signals. To do so, a curve fitting process based on least-squares is carried out. The input is the sEMG signal filtered using singular spectrum analysis technique. The output corresponds to the muscular force estimated by the ID analysis of the recorded task, a dumbbell weightlifting. Once the model parameters are tuned, it is possible to obtain an estimation of muscular forces based on sEMG signal. This procedure might be used to predict muscular forces in vivo outside the space limitations of the gait analysis laboratory.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under project DPI2012-38331-C03, co-financed by the European Union through EFRD funds. The support is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical, Energetic and Materials Engineering, University of Extremadura, Avda. de Elvas s/n, 06006, Badajoz, Spain

    F. Romero, F. J. Alonso & C. Gragera

  2. Department of Industrial Engineering II, University of La Coruña, Mendizábal s/n, 15403, Ferrol, Spain

    U. Lugrís

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Research Centre (CREB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Avda. Diagonal 647, 08028, Barcelona, Spain

    J. M. Font-Llagunes

Authors
  1. F. Romero
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  2. F. J. Alonso
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  3. C. Gragera
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  4. U. Lugrís
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  5. J. M. Font-Llagunes
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to F. Romero.

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All authors confirm that there are no competing interests associated with this publication.

Ethical approval

The experimental procedure was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of La Coruña (CE-UDC), and confirmed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness by the endorsement of the project DPI2012-38331-C03 that involves the three participant universities.

Additional information

Technical Editor Estevam Las Casas.

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Romero, F., Alonso, F.J., Gragera, C. et al. Estimation of muscular forces from SSA smoothed sEMG signals calibrated by inverse dynamics-based physiological static optimization. J Braz. Soc. Mech. Sci. Eng. 38, 2213–2223 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-016-0575-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-016-0575-x

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