Feedback Control of Functional Electrical Stimulation for 2D Arm Reaching Movements

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) can be used as a neuroprosthesis in which muscles are stimulated by electrical pulses to compensate for the loss of voluntary movement control. Modulating the stimulation intensities to reliably generate movements is a challenging control problem. This paper introduces a feedback controller for a multi-muscle FES system to control hand movements in a two-dimensional (table-top) task space. This feedback controller is based on a recent human motor control model, which uses muscle synergies to simplify its calculations and improve the performance. This synergy-based controller employs direct relations between the muscle synergies and the produced hand force, thereby allowing for the real-time calculation of six muscle stimulation levels required to reach an arbitrary target. The experimental results show that this control scheme can perform arbitrary point-to-point reaching tasks in the two-dimensional task space in real-time, with an average of ~2 cm final hand position error from the specified targets. The success of this prototype demonstrates the potential of the proposed method for the feedback control of functional tasks with FES.