Investigation of bio-mechanical indicators to explore the performance of mental preparation

The research has been carried out in order to understand if mental preparation (motor imagery) influences (increases) force level control, by viewing the achieved force level in accordance with the one required by the task. To do it, thirty six young healthy subjects performed isometric forearm contractions at 3 force levels (low, medium, high) of their maximal voluntary contraction. Half of the subjects have mentally prepared their motion (motor imagery) before to perform the exercise and the other half have performed the exercise without motor imagery (control group). The work is composed of three parts. The first one was devoted to force signal processing: baseline rectification, denoising and features extraction. The second part was devoted to unsupervised classification which aims re-organizing the realized force levels to three real separated classes. The third part aimed to provide results of force level self-control and regulation. We mainly show that mental preparation increase the performance the force level respect.