Superimposition of electrical stimulation during voluntary contractions is used to produce functional movements in individuals with central nervous system impairment, to evaluate the ability to activate a muscle, to characterize the nature of fatigue, and to improve muscle strength during postsurgical rehabilitation. Currently, the manner in which voluntary contractions and electrically elicited forces summate is not well understood. The objective of the present study is to develop a model that predicts the forces obtained when electrical stimulation is superimposed on a volitional contraction. Quadriceps femoris muscles of 12 able-bodied subjects were tested. Our results showed that the total force produced when electrical stimulation was superimposed during a volitional contraction could be modeled by the equation T = V + S[(MaxForce – V)/MaxForce]N, where T is the total force produced, V is the force in response to volitional contraction alone, S is the force response to the electrical stimulation alone, MaxForce is the maximum force-generating ability of the muscle, and N is a parameter that we posit depends on the differences in the motor unit recruitment order and firing rates between volitional and electrically elicited contractions. In addition, our results showed that the model predicted accurately (intraclass correlation coefficient ≥0.97) the total force in response to a wide range of stimulation intensities and frequencies superimposed on a wide range of volitional contraction levels. Thus the model will be helpful to clinicians and scientists to predict the amount of stimulation needed to produce the targeted force levels in individuals with partial paralysis.
We wanted to test if pre-exercise muscle irradiation with 904 nm laser affects the development of fatigue, blood lactate levels and creatine kinase (CK) activity in a rat model with tetanic contractions. Thirty male Wistar rats were divided into five groups receiving either one of four different ...
Forward solutions with different levels of complexity are employed for localization of current generators, which are responsible for the electric and magnetic fields measured from the human brain. The influence of brain anisotropy on the forward solution is poorly understood. The goal of this stu...
To investigate relationships between hemodynamic responses and neural activities in the somatosensory cortices, hemodynamic responses by near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded simultaneously while subjects received electrical stimulation in the right medi...
The contractility of tissue-engineered muscle on the application of electrical signals is required for the development of bio-actuators and for muscle tissue regeneration. Investigations have already reported on the contraction of myotubes differentiated from myoblasts and the construction of tis...
The aim of this study was to compare the possible changes in muscle activation level between a first and second bout of damaging eccentric exercise performed at 2 weeks interval (i.e. repeated bout effect). To that purpose, ten physically active males took part in this study. The eccentric exerci...
Cardiac tissue-engineering research is focused on the development of functional three-dimensional (3D) heart muscle in vitro. These models allow the detailed study of critical events in organogenesis, such as the establishment of cell-cell communication and construction and modification of the ex...
Animal locomotion results from muscle contraction and relaxation cycles that are generated within the central nervous system and then are relayed to the periphery by motoneurons. Thus, motoneuron function is an essential element for understanding control of animal locomotion. This paper presents ...
Electrical muscle stimulation demonstrates potential for preventing muscle atrophy and restoring functional movement after spinal cord injury (SCI). Control systems used to optimize delivery of electrical stimulation protocols depend upon the algorithms generated using computational models of par...
We address gravitation and inertia in the framework of a general gauge principle (GGP) which accounts for the gravitation gauge groupGR generated by a hidden local internal symmetry implemented on the flat space. Following the method of phenomenological Lagrangians, we connect the group GR to a n...
The summation of contractile forces of motor units (MUs) was analyzed by comparing the recorded force during parallel stimulation of two and four individual MUs or four groups of MUs to the algebraic sum of their individual forces. Contractions of functionally-isolated single MUs of the medial ga...
