Adapting Full Body Synergies

Boğaziçi University Department of Computer Engineering BSc Graduation Project (491) Fall 2017 Adapting Full Body Synergies project is an analysis on humans’ way of controlling motor movements. Instead of controlling all degrees  of freedom separately, brain tends to use combinations of \textit{motor synergies} to perform a movement, which is more efficient. After conforming this capability of humans, the synergies are extracted to perform further analysis on human learning. First,  the data from a periodic movement, walking, is collected as reference. Then, the same movement with a constraint on it is performed multiple times. In this research, the aim is to see if the synergies extracted from the restricted movement will eventually  converge to the base synergies after the subject learns how to perform the constrained version of the movement. The variances of motor primitives in novice walk converge to the original variances at the end. Further experiments will be done in the next semester.  This is an important question to tackle in order to understand how human central nervous system works in adaptation of difficult tasks.