Author: Tyler Johnson and Dawn Taylor

Objective. Intracortical recordings have now been combined with functional electrical stimulation (FES) of arm/hand muscles to demonstrate restoration of upper-limb function after spinal cord injury. However, for each desired limb position decoded from the brain, there are multiple combinations of muscle stimulation levels that can produce that position. The objective of this simulation study is to explore how modulating the amount of coactivation of antagonist muscles during FES can impact reaching performance and energy usage. Stiffening the limb by cocontracting antagonist muscles makes the limb more resistant to perturbation. Minimizing cocontraction saves energy and reduces fatigue. Approach. Prior demonstrations of reaching via FES used a fixed empirically-derived lookup table for each joint that defined the muscle stimulation levels that would position the limb at the desired joint angle decoded from the brain at each timestep. This study expands on that pr...