Muscle synergies and spinal maps are sensitive to the asymmetry induced by a unilateral stroke.

Background: Previous studies have shown that a cerebrovascular accident disrupts the coordinated control of leg muscles during locomotion inducing asymmetric gait patterns. However, the ability of muscle synergies and spinal maps to reflect the redistribution of the workload between legs after the trauma has not been investigated so far.

Methods: To investigate this issue, twelve post-stroke and ten healthy participants were asked to walk on a treadmill at controlled speeds (0.

Characterization of EMG patterns from proximal arm muscles during object- and orientation-specific grasps.

Reach-to-grasp tasks are composed of several actions that are more and more considered as simultaneously controlled by the central nervous system in a feedforward manner (at least for well-known activities). If this hypothesis is correct, during prehension tasks, the activity of proximal muscles (and not only of the distal ones used to control finger movements) is modulated according to the kind of object to be grasped and its position. This means that different objects could be identified by processing the electromyographic (EMG) signals recorded from proximal muscles.

Kinematic characterization of functional reach to grasp in normal and in motor disabled children.

The upper limb kinematics were assessed during the execution of a functional task in healthy adults, children and in children with motor disabilities (i.e. hemiplegic cerebral palsy (HCP) and movement disorders (MD)).

Assessment of walking features from foot inertial sensing.

An ambulatory monitoring system is developed for the estimation of spatio-temporal gait parameters. The inertial measurement unit embedded in the system is composed of one biaxial accelerometer and one rate gyroscope, and it reconstructs the sagittal trajectory of a sensed point on the instep of the foot. A gait phase segmentation procedure is devised to determine temporal gait parameters, including stride time and relative stance; the procedure allows to define the time intervals needed for carrying an efficient implementation of the strapdown integration, which allows to estimate stride length, walking speed, and incline.