Effects of contraction path and velocity on the coordination of hand muscles during a three-digit force production task

Though many studies indicated that the behavior of single muscle was different between contraction and relaxation, the effect of contraction history profile on multiple muscles has not been investigated. In this study, we analyzed the influence of contraction history on the coordination patterns of hand muscles during a three-digit force production task. The effects of the contraction and relaxation paths with two contraction velocities (5% and 10% maximum voluntary contraction per second) were investigated. The results showed that the force-independent characteristic of muscle coordination patterns still held regardless of the contraction history profiles. In addition, the effect of contraction path was more significant than that of velocity. The study provides a potential way to overcome the impact of contraction disturbance for improving the robustness of the human-machine interface (HMI) based on electromyographic (EMG) pattern recognition.