Feasibility of EMG-based control of shoulder muscle FES in C5 SCI

We investigated the potential use of EMG recordings from voluntary shoulder muscles in individuals with C5 spinal cord injury to automatically control the stimulation to paralyzed shoulder muscles in a taskappropriate manner. A musculoskeletal model of the human shoulder and elbow was used in simulation to train an artificial neural network (ANN) to automatically generate appropriate stimulation patterns for the “paralyzed” muscles based on “voluntary” muscle activations. Substantial shoulder strength was provided by adding just two muscles (pectoralis major and latissimus dorsi), and the needed activations of these “stimulated” muscles could be predicted with reasonable accuracy using just two muscles (trapezius and rhomboids) as control sources.