New control strategies for neuroprosthetic systems

The availability of techniques to artificially excite paralyzed muscles opens enormous potential for restoring both upper and lower extremity movements with\ud neuroprostheses. Neuroprostheses must stimulate muscle, and control and regulate the artificial movements produced. Control methods to accomplish these tasks include feedforward (open-loop), feedback, and adaptive control. Feedforward control requires a great deal of information about the biomechanical behavior of the limb. For the upper extremity, an artificial motor program was developed to provide such movement program input to a neuroprosthesis. In lower extremity control, one group achieved their best results by attempting to meet naturally perceived gait objectives rather than to follow an exact joint angle trajectory. Adaptive feedforward control, as implemented in the cycleto-cycle controller, gave good compensation for the gradual decrease in performance observed with open-loop control. A neural network controller was able to control its system to customize stimulation parameters in order to generate a desired output trajectory in a given individual and to maintain tracking performance in the presence of muscle fatigue. The authors believe that practical FNS control systems must\ud exhibit many of these features of neurophysiological systems

Evolutionary Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimisation : A survey

Peer reviewedPostprin

A dynamic multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on polynomial regression and adaptive clustering

In this paper, a dynamic multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is proposed based on polynomial regression and adaptive clustering, called DMOEA-PRAC. As the Pareto-optimal solutions and fronts of dynamic multi-objective optimization problems (DMOPs) may dynamically change in the optimization process, two corresponding change response strategies are presented for the decision space and objective space, respectively. In the decision space, the potentially useful information contained in all historical populations is obtained by the proposed predictor based on polynomial regression, which extracts the linear or nonlinear relationship in the historical change. This predictor can generate good initial population for the new environment. In the objective space, in order to quickly adapt to the new environment, an adaptive reference vector regulator is designed in this paper based on K-means clustering for the complex changes of Pareto-optimal fronts, in which the adjusted reference vectors can effectively guide the evolution. Finally, DMOEA-PRAC is compared with some recently proposed dynamic multi-objective evolutionary algorithms and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of DMOEA-PRAC in dealing with a variety of DMOPs

Model-Based Estimation of Muscle Forces Exerted During Movements

Estimation of individual muscle forces during human movement can provide insight into neural control and tissue loading and can thus contribute to improved diagnosis and management of both neurological and orthopaedic conditions. Direct measurement of muscle forces is generally not feasible in a clinical setting, and non-invasive methods based on musculoskeletal modeling should therefore be considered. The current state of the art in clinical movement analysis is that resultant joint torques can be reliably estimated from motion data and external forces (inverse dynamic analysis). Static optimization methods to transform joint torques into estimates of individual muscle forces using musculoskeletal models, have been known for several decades. To date however, none of these methods have been successfully translated into clinical practice. The main obstacles are the lack of studies reporting successful validation of muscle force estimates, and the lack of user-friendly and efficient computer software. Recent advances in forward dynamics methods have opened up new opportunities. Forward dynamic optimization can be performed such that solutions are less dependent on measured kinematics and ground reaction forces, and are consistent with additional knowledge, such as the force–length–velocity–activation relationships of the muscles, and with observed electromyography signals during movement. We conclude that clinical applications of current research should be encouraged, supported by further development of computational tools and research into new algorithms for muscle force estimation and their validation

Multiple source transfer learning for dynamic multiobjective optimization

Recently, dynamic multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (DMOEAs) with transfer learning have become popular for solving dynamic multiobjective optimization problems (DMOPs), as the used transfer learning methods in DMOEAs can effectively generate a good initial population for the new environment. However, most of them only transfer non-dominated solutions from the previous one or two environments, which cannot fully exploit all historical information and may easily induce negative transfer as only limited knowledge is available. To address this problem, this paper presents a multiple source transfer learning method for DMOEA, called MSTL-DMOEA, which runs two transfer learning procedures to fully exploit the historical information from all previous environments. First, to select some representative solutions for knowledge transfer, one clustering-based manifold transfer learning is run to cluster non-dominated solutions of the last environment to obtain their centroids, which are then fed into the manifold transfer learning model to predict the corresponding centroids for the new environment. After that, multiple source transfer learning is further run by using multisource TrAdaboost, which can fully exploit information from the above centroids in new environment and old centroids from all previous environments, aiming to construct a more accurate prediction model. This way, MSTL-DMOEA can predict an initial population with better quality for the new environment. The experimental results also validate the superiority of MSTL-DMOEA over several competitive state-of-the-art DMOEAs in solving various kinds of DMOPs