Muscle fatigue assessment during robot-mediated movements

BACKGROUND: Several neuromuscular disorders present muscle fatigue as a typical symptom. Therefore, a reliable method of fatigue assessment may be crucial for understanding how specific disease features evolve over time and for developing effective rehabilitation strategies. Unfortunately, despite its importance, a standardized, reliable and objective method for fatigue measurement is lacking in clinical practice and this work investigates a practical solution. METHODS: 40 healthy young adults performed a haptic reaching task, while holding a robotic manipulandum. Subjects were required to perform wrist flexion and extension movements in a resistive visco-elastic force field, as many times as possible, until the measured muscles (mainly flexor and extensor carpi radialis) exhibited signs of fatigue. In order to analyze the behavior and the characteristics of the two muscles, subjects were divided into two groups: in the first group, the resistive force was applied by the robot only during flexion movements, whereas, in the second group, the force was applied only during extension movements. Surface electromyographic signals (sEMG) of both flexor and extensor carpi radialis were acquired. A novel indicator to define the Onset of Fatigue (OF) was proposed and evaluated from the Mean Frequency of the sEMG signal. Furthermore, as measure of the subjects’ effort throughout the task, the energy consumption was estimated. RESULTS: From the beginning to the end of the task, as expected, all the subjects showed a decrement in Mean Frequency of the muscle involved in movements resisting the force. For the OF indicator, subjects were consistent in terms of timing of fatigue; moreover, extensor and flexor muscles presented similar OF times. The metabolic analysis showed a very low level of energy consumption and, from the behavioral point of view, the test was well tolerated by the subjects. CONCLUSION: The robot-aided assessment test proposed in this study, proved to be an easy to administer, fast and reliable method for objectively measuring muscular fatigue in a healthy population. This work developed a framework for an evaluation that can be deployed in a clinical practice with patients presenting neuromuscular disorders. Considering the low metabolic demand, the requested effort would likely be well tolerated by clinical populations.