Modular Control of Crouch Gait in Spastic Cerebral Palsy

The control of human movement is believed to be organized in sets of predefined muscular patterns usually referred to as motor modules or muscle synergies. Whether muscle synergies can be used to describe pathological control of movement is still under debate. In this paper, we present a preliminary description of the shapes, timing and weights of the synergistic patterns of three children with CP during crouch gait movements. The synergies and activations extracted from the activity of 8 lower limb muscles show strong differences with respect to healthy subjects and high similarities across patients.