First Insights About the Relationship Between Gesture Intuitiveness and Muscle Synergy

FREIRE, EDUARDO; CANO, LEONARDO ARIEL; RIVOLTA, LUCIANO; ALBARRACÍN, ANA LÍA; ACOSTA, LUCAS PEDRO; FARFÁN, FERNANDO DANIEL

Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires

Congreso; XXIV Argentinian Congress of Bioengineering (SABI 2023) and the XIII Clinical Engineering Conference; 2023

Sociedad Argentina de Bioingeniería

This paper presents initial findings from investigating the correlation between gesture intuitiveness and muscle synergy. A preliminary pilot experiment was conducted with a single participant, focusing on connectivity analysis of electromyography data to extract Muscle Networks features. The study aimed to test the hypothesis that enhanced coordination of muscle synergies serves as a reliable indicator of gesture intuitiveness. Sixteen muscles were monitored, and Intermuscular Coherence was calculated for each muscle pair. The weighted Global Efficiency metric was initially evaluated but showed no significant correlation with the intuitiveness indices. To overcome this limitation, a novel metric called Effective Average Strength (EAS) was introduced to consider only the essential muscles for each gesture. Statistical analysis revealed a significant correlation between EASgamma1 and nearly all intuitiveness indices, providing early evidence to support the hypothesis. Future work will refine the experimental protocol, expand the participant pool, and include a subjective questionnaire to further validate the relationship between EASgamma1, intuitiveness indices, and the perceived ease of performing gestures.