The purpose of this basic engineering research is to produce an instrument that will provide for fine control of muscle movement in patients who have incurred irreparable damage to the nervous system, eg., stroke and spinal-cord injury. Thus through instrument control, the patient will regain use of limbs that had lost all voluntary movement. All research proposed here will be done on cats. The proposed system provides for two sets of electrodes. One set of electrodes will be for sending electrical stimulation to the muscles to produce contraction and relaxation in a way analogous to the electrical stimulation the nervous system normally provides the muscles for voluntary control of muscle movement. A second test set of muscles and thus "sense" the degree of contraction or relaxation which determines the position of the muscle, then use this information to control the muscle movement; this, again, is an instrumentation technique analogous to the way in which the nervous system normally controls muscle movement. The unique feature of this research is that the electrical stimulus to control the muscle movement will use a range of frequencies simultaneously. The higher frequencies can be used to inhibit muscle contraction; thus it is expected that a very fine muscle response can be achieved. The result will be a more stable movement with less fatigue than previously achieved.
