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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Changes In Muscle Control And Coordination In Novel Task Learning, Sangsoo Park
Changes In Muscle Control And Coordination In Novel Task Learning, Sangsoo Park
Doctoral Dissertations
Learning many daily life motor skills is critical for survival and the quality of living in humans. As children, we develop walking and running patterns to move the body from point A to B without falling, and we learn to grasp a wide variety of objects during activities of daily living. Motor skills can be properly performed by appropriate muscle activations which are controlled by the central nervous system. How does the central nervous system develop and fine-tune its control strategy to learn a new motor skill? The aim of this dissertation was to better understand how human participants alter …
Optimal Control Of Human Running, Ross Herbert Miller
Optimal Control Of Human Running, Ross Herbert Miller
Open Access Dissertations
Humans generally use two modes of locomotion as adults. At slow speeds we walk, and at fast speeds we run. To perform either gait, we use our muscles. The central questions in this dissertation were: (1) Why do humans run the way they do, and (2) How do the mechanical properties of muscle influence running performance? Optimal control simulations of running were generated using a bipedal forward dynamics model of the human musculoskeletal system. Simulations of running and sprinting were posed as two-point boundary value problems where the muscle excitation signals were optimized to maximize an optimality criterion. In the …