Back

Fast reoptimization of human motor patterns in non-Earth gravity fields locally induced by a robotic exoskeleton

Verdel, D.; Bastide, S.; Geffard, F.; Bruneau, O.; Vignais, N.; Berret, B.

2022-11-13 neuroscience
10.1101/2022.11.10.516038 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Gravity is a ubiquitous component of our environment that we learnt to optimally integrate in movement control. Yet, altered gravity conditions arise in numerous applications from space exploration to rehabilitation, thereby pressing the sensorimotor system to adapt. Here, we used a robotic exoskeleton to test whether humans can quickly reoptimize their motor patterns in arbitrary gravity fields, ranging from 1g to -1g and passing through Mars- and Moon-like gravities. By comparing the motor patterns of actual arm movements with those predicted by an optimal control model, we show that our participants (N = 61) quickly and optimally adapted their motor patterns to each local gravity condition. These findings show that arbitrary gravity-like fields can be efficiently apprehended by humans, thus opening new perspectives in arm weight support training in manipulation tasks, whether it be for patients or astronauts.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.