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Children With and Without Dystonia Share Common Muscle Synergies While Performing Writing Tasks

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Abstract

Childhood dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by muscle overflow and variability. This is the first study that investigates upper limb muscle synergies in childhood dystonia with the twofold aim of deepening the understanding of neuromotor dysfunctions and paving the way to possible synergy-based myocontrol interfaces suitable for this neurological population. Nonnegative matrix factorization was applied to the activity of upper-limb muscles recorded during the execution of writing tasks in children with dystonia and age-matched controls. Despite children with dystonia presented compromised kinematics of the writing outcome, a strikingly similarity emerged in the number and structure of the synergy vectors extracted from children in the two groups. The analysis also revealed that the timing of activation of the synergy coefficients did not significantly differ, while the amplitude of the peaks presented a slight reduction. These results suggest that the synergy analysis has the ability of capturing the uncorrupted part of the electromyographic signal in dystonia. Such an ability supports a possible future use of muscle synergies in the design of myocontrol interfaces for children with dystonia.

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Acknowledgment

We thank Serena Maggioni for assistance with data acquisition. We thank the patients and their families.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Grant Numbers NS064046 and 1R01HD081346-01A1).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, NearLab, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Francesca Lunardini, Claudia Casellato & Alessandra Pedrocchi

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Matteo Bertucco & Terence D. Sanger

  3. Department of Neurology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Terence D. Sanger

  4. Department of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Terence D. Sanger

  5. Department of Biology, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Francesca Lunardini

Authors
  1. Francesca Lunardini
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  2. Claudia Casellato
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  3. Matteo Bertucco
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  4. Terence D. Sanger
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  5. Alessandra Pedrocchi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesca Lunardini.

Additional information

Associate Editor Zahra Moussavi oversaw the review of this article.

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Lunardini, F., Casellato, C., Bertucco, M. et al. Children With and Without Dystonia Share Common Muscle Synergies While Performing Writing Tasks. Ann Biomed Eng 45, 1949–1962 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-017-1838-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-017-1838-0

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