Project Researcher Kohei Kaminishi, recieved Young Author's Award, Research Encouragement Award from the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers

On 18th March 2024, Project Researcher Kohei Kaminishi, Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering (RACE), recieved 2023 Young Author's Award, Research Encouragement Award from the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers.

2023  Young Author's Award, Research Encouragement Award from the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers
Society of Instrument and Control Engineers This award is presented to presenters who have made research
presentations of outstanding merit at conferences, symposia, etc., organized by the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (including Divisions and Technical Committees).

About awarded research
Kohei Kaminishi, Hitohiro Etoh, Ryosuke Chiba, Kaoru Takakusaki, Jun Ota. (2023).

Effect of the number of extracted muscles on the results of muscle synergy analysis: an investigation using musculoskeletal simulation results.

Proceedings of the 35th SICE Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Systems, (pp. 7-10), Osaka, January 22-23, 2023.

Human movements are realized by the coordination of many muscles. It is known that these muscle activations can be explained by a small number of patterns called "muscle synergies". However, there are no clear guidelines on the types and numbers of muscles to include in muscle synergy analysis. Therefore, we used data from musculoskeletal simulations of walking to perform muscle synergy analyses on all muscles and then on progressively fewer selected muscles and compared the patterns obtained. The results showed that as the number of muscles included decreases, the similarity of the patterns to those obtained when all muscles were included can decrease significantly. This suggests that while the narrowing of patterns by muscle synergy analysis can be effective, it may not always capture the overall characteristics of muscle activations. Therefore, careful consideration of which muscles to include in the analysis is critical when performing muscle synergy analysis.

Your impression & future plan
I am deeply honored to receive this award. This award is a testament to the invaluable guidance of Professor Ota and all the researchers involved, coupled with the unwavering support of everyone who has championed my research efforts. My gratitude for this support is deep and heartfelt. Going forward, my goal is to deepen our understanding of human movement and broaden the scope of applications through methods such as muscle synergy analysis. This award will serve as a powerful motivator to redouble my research efforts and make a serious contribution to the advancement of science.