EditorialMuscle Synergies: Use and Validation in Clinics, Robotics,and Sports

Stefano Rossi ,1 Panagiotis K. Artemiadis ,2 Jinsook Roh ,3,4,5 and Valentina Agostini 6

1Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business Organization, University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy2Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA3Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA4Department of Kinesiology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA5Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA6Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy

Correspondence should be addressed to Stefano Rossi; stefano.rossi@unitus.it

Received 10 September 2018; Accepted 10 September 2018; Published 20 December 2018

Copyright © 2018 Stefano Rossi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Since understanding how the human brain generates neuralcommands to control muscles during motor tasks stillremains an untapped question, great interest is shown inthe validation and application of muscle synergies amongresearch groups focused on the electromyography (EMG).In the last decades, the factorization of the EMG signals bymeans of muscle synergies has been proposed to understandthe neurophysiological mechanisms related to the centralnervous system ability in reducing the dimensionality ofmuscle control. For this reason, we planned a special issueon validation and application of the muscle synergy theoryto discuss the methodological issues and to propose novelapplications in clinics, robotics, and sports. The special issueachieved success among researchers as demonstrated by thelarge amount of submitted papers and the scientific impactof the published ones.

The special issue is composed of twelve manuscripts.Three systematic reviews are included: (i) the first one isfocused on the meaning of the muscle synergy theory tounderstand its applicability as a neurorehabilitation tool(Singh et al.); (ii) the second one is useful to understand theapplications of muscle synergies in the investigation ofmuscle coordination during walking of poststroke patients(Seamon et al.); and (iii) the third one offers a complete over-view on the tangible applications of muscle synergies inclinics, robotics, and sports (Taborri et al.).

As concerns clinics, the effects of upper limb weaknessand task failure, which is the inability to maintain a certainlevel of force during a task, on the muscle synergies are eval-uated by Roh et al. and Castronovo et al., respectively. Asregards robotics, the feasibility to use a muscle synergyapproach to implement the control system of an upperlimb exoskeleton is presented by Chiavenna et al. Movingto the sports, two papers are focused on understanding themuscle synergy organization during the execution of spe-cific technical actions of the badminton (Matsunaga et al.and Barnamehei et al.), one paper shows the muscle syn-ergy structure involved in stability exercises of rhythmicgymnastics (Rutkowska-Kucharska et al.), while the motorcontrol underlying the throwing movement is studied byCruz-Ruiz et al. Finally, two papers investigate some fun-damental methodological issues; in particular concerningthe influence of initialization techniques for the applica-tion of non-negative matrix factorization (Soomro et al.)and the reliability and repeatability of the methodologyfor extracting muscle synergies during daily life activities(Taborri et al.).

We hope that this special issue can represent animportant step to strengthen the use of muscle synergiesto explain how the human brain organizes the muscleactivation both in clinics and robotics, as well as insports applications.

HindawiApplied Bionics and BiomechanicsVolume 2018, Article ID 6345256, 2 pageshttps://doi.org/10.1155/2018/6345256

Conflicts of Interest

As Guest Editorial team of special issue named “MuscleSynergies: Use and Validation in Clinics, Robotics, andSports” in “Applied Bionics and Biomechanics,” we declarethat there are no conflicts of interest or private agreementswith companies regarding our work for this special issue.We have no financial relationships through employment, con-sultancies, either stock ownership or honoraria, with industry.

Stefano RossiPanagiotis K. Artemiadis

Jinsook RohValentina Agostini

2 Applied Bionics and Biomechanics

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