Proportional Myoelectric Control of a Virtual Inverted Pendulum Using Residual Antagonistic Muscles: Toward Voluntary...

This paper aims to investigate whether transtibial amputees are capable of coordinating the descending neural commands to antagonistic residual ankle muscles for performing dynamic tasks that require continuous, precise control. To achieve this goal, we developed a virtual inverted pendulum that was inherently unstable and mimicked human-like dynamics in a standing posture. Balancing this dynamic system requires continuous inputs, proportional to electromyography (EMG) magnitudes recorded from (residual) tibialis anterior (TA) and lateral gastrocnemius muscles (GAS), respectively. The six able-bodied and six transtibial amputees were recruited and asked to balance the inverted pendulum for ten 90-s trials. The results showed that the amputees were capable of controlling this unstable dynamic system with a proportional myoelectric control; however, they underperformed the able-bodied subjects, who maintained the pendulum closer to center ( p = 0.041 ). Compared to the performance in the initial two trials, amputees improved the performance by significantly reducing the number of pendulum falls ( p = 0.0329 ) and sway size ( p = 0.048 ) in the final two trials. However, the amount of improvement varied across amputee subjects. Amputee subjects demonstrated different task adaptation strategies, including reduction of erroneous residual muscle contractions, development of an appropriate state-action (pendulum state-EMG activation) relationship for the task, and/or reduction of muscle control variability with the improved task performance efficiency (i.e., increased inactivity and sway minimization). The results suggest that after the training of transtibial amputees in coordinating antagonistic residual muscles in dynamic systems, it may be feasible to implement the proportional myoelectric control of the powered ankle prostheses in order to assist the postural control mechanisms, such as anticipatory and compensatory postural adjustments.