Evidence of a "Clock" Determining Human Locomotion

The motor control of human locomotion is still an open issue, and it may be the leading cause of the low effectiveness of lower limbs rehabilitation therapies. Locomotion motor control has proved to be fundamentally different from the upper limbs reaching task strategies, which have been used for the development of current motor control computational models used to define rehabilitation protocols. The main difference between these two tasks is the relevance of the environmental dynamics in task planning and execution. Reaching movements are dominated by the intrinsic impedance of the human body. On the other hand, locomotion is determined by the interaction between the human body and Earth's gravity. The dynamic primitives have been recently proposed to explain how humans account for the environmental dynamics during motor control; however, it is not yet possible to explain how the nervous system combines the information. This paper proposes and validates with human data that the brain controls locomotion to have the centre of mass moving between the two legs as a harmonic oscillator. This finding has enabled us to propose a control architecture that can explain how the motor primitives can be described as a special type of dynamics primitives.