Starting date: April the 10th 2019
Duration: 20 months

 
Project category

OPTION 1: develop a benchmarking solution for one specific benchmarking scenario including one or more outcomes: testbed, software routines and/or experimental datasets.

 
Application

Wearable robots

 
Outcome

Software

 
Team:

COORDINATOR:

  • Fondazione Santa Lucia (Italy)

PARTNER 2

  • Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata (Italy)

PARTNER 3

  • Università degli Studi di Messsina (Italy)
Abstract
In the context of the EUROBENCH goals of developing benchmarking metrics and algorithms that allow automatic calculation of performance scores based on recorded data, we propose a unified benchmarking software for evaluating the spinal locomotor output based on multi-muscle activity patterns and providing performance measures closely related to the control strategy for adaptation of human walking with an exoskeleton.
 
The proposed benchmarking software will provide performance indicators of ‘muscle coordination’ based on preprocessed EMG signals. The goal is to evaluate changes in the functional and structural organization of the spinal locomotor output that can be mapped into muscle synergies and spinal maps of motor pool activity during walking with an exoskeleton. The final neural locomotor output is represented by the spatiotemporal modulation of motoneuron (MN) activity, which can be assessed by decomposing the coordinated muscle activation profiles into a small set of common factors, and by mapping the activity patterns from a large number of simultaneously recorded muscles onto the anatomical rostrocaudal location of the MN pools in the spinal cord, thus looking backward from the periphery to the CNS and to the central motor programming.
 
The PEPATO sub-project will consist of three main tasks. The first two tasks aim at developing software for automatic generation of two main groups of outcome indicators for evaluating muscle coordination during walking in the exoskeleton (muscle synergies [TASK 1] and spinal maps [TASK 2]), while the third task [TASK 3] Will provide the reference database and reference performance indicators for normal walking of neurologically intact individuals.