Construction of Experimental Environment for Muscle Synergy Analysis of Bipedal Walking in Rats

The bodies of humans and animals are composed of too many muscles and joints for achieving movement. To deal with such a problem of redundancy, humans and animals use a set of muscles coordinately and simplify the body for control. This coordination of muscles is called muscle synergies. Muscle synergy has been reported to change by neural diseases, such that the activity in muscle synergies of walking prolonged with cerebellar ataxia. In order to investigate the relationship between muscle synergies and neural diseases, we measured the hindlimb EMGs of bipedal walking in rats and analyzed the muscle synergies. This report shows the construction of the experimental environment, method of EMG measurement and synergy analysis in intact rats.