An Assessment of Six Muscle Spindle Models for Predicting Sensory Information during Human Wrist Movements.

Background: The muscle spindle is an important sensory organ for proprioceptive information, yet there have been few attempts to use Shannon information theory to quantify the capacity of human muscle spindles to encode sensory input.

Methods: Computer simulations linked kinematics, to biomechanics, to six muscle spindle models that generated predictions of firing rate. The predicted firing rates were compared to firing rates of human muscle spindles recorded during a step-tracking (center-out) task to validate their use.