The Delft Laboratory for Neuromuscular Control: Haptic Robots for the Identification of Neuro-Muscular Control

Motoneurons in the spinal cord activate the muscles and, as being the 'final common pathway', receive input from sensory afferents (muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs) and input from higher brain centers. Afferent feedback plays an important role during human motor control and is an adaptive regulator assisting different types of movement and loading conditions. The integration of peripheral feedback and supraspinal input from the brain is topic of ongoing and future research, both in the normal situation and in pathological cases. Movement disorders like spasticity are often attributed to a disbalance between peripheral feedback and supraspinal commands. This laboratory paper gives an overview of the research performed on human movement control and system identification, as carried out by the Delft Laboratory for Neuromuscular Control (NMC). The merits and limitations of current methods are discussed and the future lines of research are sketched. At the end, possible clinical applications are described. It is concluded that system identification techniques are a very useful tool to gain insight into the (patho)physiology of the human movement system. Clinical application of identification techniques is in it's early stage and is a very promising field of multidisciplinary research.