Understanding finger mechanics and motor control in young and elderly

Quality of fine hand motor control decreases in the elderly. Deterioration of handwriting and de-creased stability in other precision tasks, like grasping and fine handicraft, reflect a loss of movement flexibility. A number of factors can be held responsible. Wrist joint mobility can become limited, but also the biomechanical function of individual muscles and their neurophysiological characteristics in the musculosketetal complex may change. Both neural and mechanical muscle and tendon connectivities are essential in the system’s versatility. This project is one of two projects, which have as major objective to increase our understanding of the changing “neuromechanics” of hand motor control with age. The experimental  data collected will be used to further develop and tune a hand model by biomechanical constraints and valid muscle activation parameters (project II). This all to increase its quality and validity to allow prediction and understanding phenomena as occur in the aging population. We will first study the biomechanics of the interaction and the connection of muscles and tendon structures with advanced 3-D dynamic ultrasound during various manipulations of finger positions and finger endpoint forces. The question is whether documented age related changes in musculoskeletal mechanical properties contribute to the deterioration of fine control of the fingers.