The variability of co-activation pattern of antagonist muscles in human infant crawling

Infant crawling is part of normal human gross motor development, and a 4-beat gait that involves rhythmical flexion and extension of limbs and the underlying muscle co-activation of antagonist muscle around the joint. However, detection the co-activation pattern of antagonist muscle are sparse due to the general difficulty of measuring locomotion in human infants. In this paper, sEMG of antagonist muscles and the corresponding kinematics data of limbs were collected when infants were crawling on hands and knees at their self-selected speed. The infant's gross motor developmental status was assessed by the global Gross Motor Function Measure Scale (GMFM-88) as well. The method based on EMG-EMG plots was used to quantify the variability of co-activation pattern of antagonist muscle. After that, we observed that antagonist muscles of upper limb (triceps brachii and biceps brachii) showed less variability of co-activation pattern of muscles than lower limb(quadriceps femoris and hamstrings) during crawling, and this variability was also varied in different crawling phases (stance and swing). Furthermore, we found some varied behaviors in the co-activation patterns of antagonist muscles when gross motor developmental level increased. The preliminary work suggests that such adaptive changes may be related to the adjustment of neuromuscular in the early stage of gross motor development.