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Presented By: Biomedical Engineering

Master's Defense: Manan Parag Anjaria

The Effect of Different Ankle-Foot Prostheses on Muscle Contributions During Walking

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Individual muscle contributions to facilitate limb motion are altered in people with transtibial amputation. Specifically, proximal muscles on the residual limb and muscles on the intact limb compensate for the lack of plantarflexor muscles on the residual limb. Powered ankle prostheses have been developed to replace the function of the ankle plantarflexor muscles. As powered prostheses can help people with amputation walk faster, and replicate local ankle joint mechanics similar to biological ankles, we expect that muscle activity would also differ when using powered prostheses compared to unpowered prosthesis. Exploring muscle synergies, or the patterns of co-activation of muscles recruited by a single neural command signal, can provide insight into the neural control strategies used to walk with different types of prostheses. The goal of this study was to determine if the use of a powered ankle prosthesis affected muscle coordination and coactivation in comparison to the use of unpowered prosthesis. Nine people with unilateral transtibial amputation and 9 age-matched, non-amputee controls walked on a treadmill while muscle activity from 16 lower limb muscles were collected. Participants with amputation performed two trials, one with an unpowered and one with a powered prosthesis, on the same day. People with transtibial amputation had higher thigh muscle co-contraction when walking with powered prostheses. They also had the same number of synergies in both prostheses as the non-amputee group, which suggests that the complexity of the motor control strategy is not affected by amputation or prosthesis type. The first three synergies in the intact limb were similar, however, the contribution of different muscles to the fourth synergy varied in people with amputation as they used more knee flexors than ankle dorsiflexors in the late swing phase. We also explored the time-varying pattern of the synergies across the gait cycle. There were some phases of the gait cycle where activation profiles for all the synergies were significantly different between the groups with and without amputation. However, there were strong correlations between muscle weightings for each synergy between the groups with and without amputation, with both prostheses. This indicates that they used a similar muscle recruitment strategy. The use of powered prosthesis reduced the compensatory activity of the proximal muscles making the intact limb synergies muscle weightings more similar to healthy individuals with prolonged or delayed activation profiles. The study could not offer any interpretations of the synergies of the residual limb due to lesser muscle activity data available. Future work should be focused including a larger set of muscles including the lumbar muscles and residual leg muscles to get a better look at the muscle synergy.

Chair: Dr. Deanna Gates
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