A versatile approach to determine instantaneous co-activation: Development, implementation and comparison to existing measures

摘要

An adaptable method of computing muscle co-activity is presented. Instantaneous muscle activities from multiple muscles are reduced into commonality and activity level dimensions. Both dimensions are weighted independently and combined into a co-activation measure, Phi. Myoelectric data from relaxed and braced simulated rear vehicle impacts were used to compare Phi to two existing co-activity measures in muscle pair and multi-muscle cases. Phi showed greater sensitivity in the muscle pair case and could better discriminate the relaxed and braced conditions in the multi-muscle case than previous measures. The flexibility of Phi allowed tailoring to reflect the current purpose.