Goal in My Doctoral Training

Surface Electromyography, Sonography and Motion Analysis are the three major research tools in physical therapy and rehabilitation science. Surface Electromyography is the common tool to not only quantify recruitment of motor unit and measure muscle activation level, but also be a biofeedback for muscle training and a measurement index of muscle fatigue. For these reasons, when evaluating neural muscular injuries or problems of muscle regulation, Surface Electromyography often becomes the first choice for assessment tool.


With the development of Sonography, the application of Sonography on investigating muscle architecture has increased recently. The advantages of Sonography are portable and convenient using which lead researchers to have the ability of observing the properties of muscle architect such as fascicle length, angle and curvature. The great advantage is that Sonography can provide real-time observation of changes of muscle architecture by recording the changes of fascicle accurately during joint movement. Therefore, by measuring the force of muscle and the displacement of muscle-tendon junction, researchers can calculate the material properties of tendon which is an important role of human movements.


Also, Motion Analysis is an important tool to get the kinematic and biomechanical parameters during human movement, so researchers or physical therapists can evaluate the movement deficits, movement compensations and changes of movement strategy after suffering from neural muscular disorders. All these three measurement tools are to delve the procedure from the brain which conducts the signal to muscles, producing muscle contraction and pulling tendon to accomplish joint movements, eventually.

While all these novel analytic tools have been developed, the treatments of neural muscular disorders are primarily based on rehabilitation physicians and physical therapists, giving the treatments from weight and balance training to task-oriented training via their evaluations and observations. However, I believe in the nearly future high technologic treatments such as exoskeleton, functional electrical stimulation or robotic rehabilitation will be broadly clinically used broadly.

For this reason, I hope I can learn how to establish the relationship between human movements or performances and biomedical signals by modeling (algorithm) which is the core of my research framework. Because through modeling, we can predict joint movements and estimate joint torque and muscle force successfully even trajectory of limbs’ movements. It is an important information to design robotic rehabilitation equipments. I hope I can use this knowledge to provide information of design of training equipments, and provide more accurate regulation, biofeedback and control on applications of exoskeleton or functional electrical stimulation.