A versatile approach to determine instantaneous co-activation: Development, implementation and comparison to existing measures

Abstract

An adaptable method of computing muscle co-activity is presented. Instantaneous muscle activities from multiple muscles are reduced into commonality and activity level dimensions. Both dimensions are weighted independently and combined into a co-activation measure, Φ. Myoelectric data from relaxed and braced simulated rear vehicle impacts were used to compare Φ to two existing co-activity measures in muscle pair and multi-muscle cases, Φ showed greater sensitivity in the muscle pair case and could better discriminate the relaxed and braced conditions in the multi-muscle case than previous measures. The flexibility of Φ allowed tailoring to reflect the current purpose.

Keywords:

• Co-activity
• muscle activity
• electromyography
• rear impact
• co-contraction