Sensorimotor Time Delay Estimation by EMG Signal Processing in People Living with Spinal Cord Injury

Neuro mechanical time delay is inevitable in the sensorimotor control of the body due to sensory, transmission, signal processing and muscle activation delays. In essence, time delay reduces stabilization efficiency, leading to system instability (e.g., falls). For this reason, estimation of time delay in patients such as people living with spinal cord injury (SCI) can help therapists and biomechanics to design more appropriate exercise or assistive technologies in the rehabilitation procedure.

• 1
  The results demonstrated that the TKEO technique could efficiently remove the electrocardiogram (ECG) and motion artifacts compared with the simple classical filtering approach.
• 2
  However, the first and second strategies failed to find muscle onset in several trials, which shows the weakness of these two strategies.
• 3
  The time–frequency techniques (cepstral analysis and power spectrum) estimated longer activation onset compared with the other two strategies in the time domain, which we associate with lower-frequency movement in the maintaining of sitting stability.