Muscle Synergies Robustly Control Forces for Balance Control

We demonstrate that a limited number of muscle synergies can be used to reconstruct complex muscle activation patterns and forces produced during two types of postural perturbations. Our results suggest that low-dimension neural command signals may activate muscle synergies to produce high-dimension muscle activation patterns. Furthermore, muscle synergies may be used to coordinate multijoint muscle actions for the control of high-level task variables. Muscle synergies may represent natural building blocks for motor behaviors and provide insight into neuroengineered strategies for motor rehabilitation