Activating Paralyzed Muscles using Adaptive Control and a Neuroprosthetic Technique

Natural biological control involves the normal functioning of the living organism (i.e. human body) to regulate its parameters such that the vital functions are kept within the normal operating range. When this natural control fails, the biological feedback is unstable, operating under non-optimal conditions of the subject´s vital capacity. In this context, ensuring the subject´s nominal surviving capacity requires artificial control of the vital functions. Nowadays technology enables the development of artificial closed-loop devices to correct and provide the normal functions of the organism, thus replacing the damaged parts or helping to recover their natural properties. These procedures are called rehabilitation techniques. An application of closed-loop control will exemplify the importance of the challenges posed by a neuroprosthetic technique. Rehabilitation of drop-foot or hand-grasp movements with paretic or paralyzed skeletal muscles is achieved with the proposed self-adaptive auto-tuning control strategy