Supervisors:·
Charlotte Le Mouel, Chargée de Recherches CNRS, Centre Borelli, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et Robotique, Sorbonne Université, Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser. ·
Hélène Pillet, Professeur des Universités, Institut de Biomécanique Humaine Georges Charpak, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers, Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.
Background
Maintaining balance during dynamic movement is a challenging task which, in humans, requires the coordinated contraction of more than 600 muscles to adjust the forces acting on the body. During walking and running, individual muscles do not contract independently, but work together as synergies resulting in meaningful motor outputs: muscles which counteract each other thus do not contract simultaneously [1]. Moreover, healthy adults maintain balance by minimising rotation around their Center of Mass (CoM, green in Figure 1.A). They achieve this by orienting the force exerted by the legs onto the ground such that it points to the CoM [2]. Preliminary results indicate that, during successful hand-walking, subjects also maintain balance by orienting the GRF to the CoM . This requires novel muscle synergies.
Internship
The task is to analyse experimental data of human gymnasts walking on the hands. The goal of the internship is :
1. To find a biomechanical predictor of when subjects will lose their balance, by comparing successful (Figure 1.C) and unsuccessful hand-walking trials.
2. To identify the muscle synergies allowing subjects to maintain balance during successful hand-walking trials
References
[1] E. Bizzi and V. C. K. Cheung, ‘The neural origin of muscle synergies’, Front Comput Neurosci, vol. 7, Apr. 2013.
[2] H. Herr and M. Popovic, ‘Angular momentum in human walking’, J Exp Biol, vol. 211, no. Pt 4, pp. 467–481, Feb. 2008, doi: 10.1242/jeb.008573.
Auteur du sujet
