Programa del congreso

One of the main limitations in the study of human movement is our poor ability to record in vivo from a sufficiently large number of neural cells to understand population behaviours and to associate a functional meaning to the cellular mechanisms that ultimately determine a movement. This limitation, which has a direct impact in technologies for human interfacing, can now be partly overcome, at least at the last stage of neural processing of movement, that is at the level of alpha spinal motor neurons. Motor neurons receive synaptic inputs from the entire neuromuscular system and they convert it into the neural drive to muscles. The spiking activity of motor neurons can be identified from recordings of electrical activity of muscles using either wearable (non-invasive) or minimally invasive sensors. Using these technologies, motor neurons are the only neural cells whose individual activities can be studied in humans during natural behaviour, without the need for neural implants. The talk will overview the technologies for motor neuron interfacing and their use in the study of neural control of movement and in the development of new assistive technologies.