Analysis of human standing-up motion based on distributed muscle control

In developed countries, an aging society has become a serious issue; many activities of daily living (ADL) are impaired in the elderly. In order to improve this situation, it is necessary to develop an assisting method for the human standing up motion because it is considered to be an important factor to ADL. It is unclear, however, how humans coordinate their multiple distributed actuators, muscles, due to the ill-posed problem of redundant their body system. In this paper, we analyze the human standing-up motion based on muscle coordinations, called synergies. A simulation method was developed to make mappings between muscle activations, joint torque, and the human body trajectory; thus, it can be predicted how modular muscle coordinations contribute to the motion. As a result, two primary synergies were extracted and how they coordinate to achieve the motion was elucidated; one synergy strongly affected joint movements and speed of the motion while bending the back and lifting the body up, and the other synergy controls their posture after they lift up their body. These findings could be useful for development of an assisting robotic system for rehabilitative training based on extracted distributed synergies from complex redundant human motion.