Modifying Muscle Properties in a Leading Neuromuscular Model: The Fuglevand Model Revisited.

摘要

The Fuglevand model is common to many neuromuscular simulations. However, there are elements of the physiological system currently unaccounted for by this model. The objective of this thesis was to address two of them, and observe their effects on the simulated surface electromyogram (EMG) and muscle force. The first was regionalization, the tendency of different motor unit (MU) types to predominantly reside in different regions of the muscle. We found that preferentially placing slow MUs deep and fast MUs superficially caused the EMG-force relation to become more linear, suggesting that regionalization is a relevant factor for future models. The second was modelling muscle fibres as individual entities instead of abstract quantities. We found that when modelling individual fibre properties, the force mean-variability relation no longer resembled that observed physiologically, suggesting that additional modifications, based on factors known to influence physiological force variability, may be necessary, especially at high activation levels.