• Valentina Lanzani, Cristina Brambilla, and Alessandro Scano.
• Institute of Intelligent Industrial Systems and Technologies for Advanced Manufacturing (STIIMA), Italian Council of National Research (CNR), Milan, Italy. Electronic address: valentina.lanzani@stiima.cnr.it.
• Neuroscience. 2024 Nov 16.

AbstractReaching movements are essential for daily tasks and they have been widely investigated through kinematic, kinetic, and electromyographic (EMG) analyses. Recent studies have also suggested that the central nervous system simplifies movement control by using muscle synergies. An alternative approach is to investigate how EMG activity reflects at theneural level with the spinal maps representation that visualizes the spatiotemporal activity of motoneuronal pools. Spinal maps have been rarely used and their investigation could be made by exploiting recent findings in EMG processing such as the separation of phasic (motion-related) and tonic components (anti-gravity). In this study, EMG data from 15 participants were recorded during repeated point-to-point movements toward target boards placed in five orientations. EMG waveforms were divided into total EMG envelope, tonic EMG, and phasic EMG. The multidimensional Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to assess thesimilarity of spinal maps among repetitions of movements within subjects (intra-subject variability) and among participants (inter-subject variability). Spinal maps of tonic and total EMG showed high intra- and inter-subject similarity in all planes, while phasic spinal maps were less repeatable and more subject-specific. These results may be useful as areference for rehabilitation, clinical, and neurological evaluations, especially for longitudinal assessments.Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier Inc.

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