Feedback Control of Functional Electrical Stimulation for 2D Arm Reaching Movements

Feedback Control of Functional Electrical Stimulation for 2D Arm Reaching Movements 480 270 Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering (TNSRE)

    

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) can be used as a neuroprosthesis in which muscles are stimulated by electrical pulses to compensate for the loss of voluntary movement control. Modulating the stimulation intensities to reliably generate movements is a challenging control problem. This paper introduces a feedback controller for a multi-muscle FES system to control hand movements in a two-dimensional (table-top) task space. This feedback controller is based on a recent human motor control model, which uses muscle synergies to simplify its calculations and improve the performance. This synergy-based controller employs direct relations between the muscle synergies and the produced hand force, thereby allowing for the real-time calculation of six muscle stimulation levels required to reach an arbitrary target. The experimental results show that this control scheme can perform arbitrary point-to-point reaching tasks in the two-dimensional task space in real-time, with an average of ~2 cm final hand position error from the specified targets. The success of this prototype demonstrates the potential of the proposed method for the feedback control of functional tasks with FES.