Abstract
Biological limbs are designed in a way that gives them large flexibility to make a wide variety of complex movements. This flexibility is provided by the relatively large number of joints and of mono- and poly-articular muscles. This large set of joints and muscles has raised the issue of coordination for simple movements, for which the neuro-muscular system is redundant with respect to the number of degrees of freedom required for these movements. Several suggestions have been proposed in the literature. Most of these suggestions are based on the notion of imposing additional constraints. Among these are the minimization of total muscle torque (Yeo, 1976) and the minimization of fatigue (Dul, 1984a, 1984b). It has been shown, however, that most of these criteria cannot explain the observed activation of arm muscles in man (Gielen et al., 1988a).
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Gielen, S., van Ingen Schenau, GJ., Tax, T., Theeuwen, M. (1990). The Activation of Mono- and Bi-Articular Muscles in Multi-Joint Movements. In: Winters, J.M., Woo, S.LY. (eds) Multiple Muscle Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9030-5_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9030-5_18
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