Effect of intermittent feedback control on robustness of human-like postural control system

Humans have to acquire postural robustness to maintain stability against internal and external perturbations. Human standing has been recently modelled using an intermittent feedback control. However, the causality inside of the closed-loop postural control system associated with the neural control strategy is still unknown. Here, we examined the effect of intermittent feedback control on postural robustness and of changes in active/passive components on joint coordinative structure. We implemented computer simulation of a quadruple inverted pendulum that is mechanically close to human tiptoe standing. We simulated three pairs of joint viscoelasticity and three choices of neural control strategies for each joint: intermittent, continuous, or passive control. We examined postural robustness for each parameter set by analysing the region of active feedback gain. We found intermittent control at the hip joint was necessary for model stabilisation and model parameters affected the robustness of the pendulum. Joint sways of the pendulum model were partially smaller than or similar to those of experimental data. In conclusion, intermittent feedback control was necessary for the stabilisation of the quadruple inverted pendulum. Also, postural robustness of human-like multi-link standing would be achieved by both passive joint viscoelasticity and neural joint control strategies.