• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.1967-1974
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• 1991

When the functional electrical stimulation is employed to recover mobility to the plegic, it is very important to understand functions of the selected muscles. I have investigated how a muscle acts to accelerate the body segments, since the body segements are connected by joints so that contraction of a muscle not only rotates the segments to which it is attached but also causes other segments to rotate by creation a reaction force at every joint, which is called the inertial coupling. I found that a single-joint muscle always acts to accelerate the spanned joint in the same direction as the joint torque produced by the muscle. However, a double-joint muscle can act to accelerate the spanned joint in the opposite direction to the joint torque produced by the muscle depending on (1) the body position, (2) the body-segmental parameters, and (3) the type of the movement. Investigating the condition number of the inertia matrix of the body-segmental model gave us some insights into how controllable the body-segmental system is for different values of the factors mentioned above. The results suggested that the upright position is the most undesirable position to independently control the three segments(trunk, thigh and shank) and that the controllability is the most sensitive to variation of the shank length and the trunk mass, which implies that accuracy is required particularly when we estimate these two body-segmental parameters before the paralyzed muscles are innervated by using electrical stimulation.