The central nervous system adjusts muscle synergy structure and tightly controls rollator-supported transitions...

Older individuals are at risk of falling. Assistive devices like rollators help to reduce that risk, especially by compensating for decreased leg muscle strength and balance problems. Paradoxically, rollators have been found to be a fall risk as well as being difficult to use. To investigate the causes, this study examines how different levels of rollator support (no assistance, light touch, and full support) and balance demands (standard lab floor, balance pads) affect movement coordination during standing up and sitting down movements.

Twenty young participants stood up and sat down while full-body kinematics and muscle activity (30 channels) were recorded. Participants stood up and sat down using different movement strategies (e.g., forward leaning, hybrid, and vertical rise standing up movement strategies). For each movement strategy, spatial and temporal muscle synergies were extracted from the muscle activity patterns. Temporal muscle synergies provided a more compact, low-dimensional representation than spatial muscle synergies, so they were subsequently clustered with k-means++. The activation duration of the temporal muscle synergies was assessed with full-width at half-maximum at the main peak. Multivariate linear mixed models were used to investigate if the muscle weightings associated with the temporal muscle synergies differed across the support conditions.

The timings of the temporal muscle synergy activations, but not the shape, differed across the movement strategies for both types of movement. Across all tasks, temporal muscle synergies showed a narrower width of activation around the time of seat-off and seat-on than at the movement start and end. No support-specific temporal muscle synergies were found, but lower limb muscle weightings decreased while upper-limb muscle weightings increased with increased support.

The narrow shape of the temporal synergy activation profiles suggests that the central nervous system controls the movements tightly, especially around seat-off and seat-on and in challenging conditions with increased balance demands. Furthermore, rollator support increases the weightings of upper body and decreases the weightings of lower limb muscles, especially around seat-off and seat-on. Future studies may further investigate how the loss of tight movement control may cause falls in older individuals.