A quantitative and qualitative description of electromyographic linear envelopes for synergy analysis

The muscular synergy patterns of human locomotion can be described by the phasic activity of electromyographic linear envelopes (LE) and the interphasic spatio-temporal relations. To represent the phasic activity, the LE is modeled as the summation of Gaussian pulses of various lengths. The parameters of interest are the temporal features: time, duration, and amplitude of the phases of activity. A maximum likelihood approach to the parameter estimation for a mixture of normal distributions is adopted for extracting the temporal features. Based on the derived temporal features, a set of relational descriptors can be defined to describe the spatio-temporal relations between the multichannel phasic activities. The strength of this approach is not only that the plastic activity of the LE can be quantitatively represented accurately, but also that the resulting synergy patterns can be easily interpreted by observers.