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Assessing Kinetics of Functional Electrical Stimulation Rowing in Spinal Cord Injury Patients
Author(s) -
Draghici Adina,
Shefelbine Sandra,
Taylor J Andrew,
Picard Glen
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.29.1_supplement.1055.2
Subject(s) - rowing , functional electrical stimulation , spinal cord injury , physical medicine and rehabilitation , medicine , population , aerobic exercise , physical therapy , stimulation , spinal cord , archaeology , psychiatry , history , environmental health
‘Hybrid’ functional electrical stimulation (FES) ergometer rowing is a novel training therapy that enables the spinal cord injury (SCI) population to exercise the innervated upper body together with the electrically stimulated lower body muscles. This produces significantly greater aerobic power and peak oxygen consumption than either upper body or FES exercise alone. However, there is minimal information on the mechanical efficiency of FES‐rowing in the SCI population. A Concept 2 rowing ergometer was adapted to accommodate SCI patients and was instrumented to record upper body force and lower limbs forces. The objective of this work was to characterize efficiency during FES‐rowing by measuring the forces applied by the arms and the legs and the parameters observed during maximal aerobic capacity tests in SCI and able‐bodied rowers. The current setup allows correlating changes in oxygen consumption with changes in effective muscle forces collected at the feet and handle at three submaximal rowing intensities and during a submaximal bout of rowing to fatigue in SCI and able‐bodied rowers. The data suggests that while able‐bodied rowers increase legs and arms forces proportional with increased rowing intensity, the SCI rowers use primarily their arms to achieve a higher rowing wattage. FES‐rowing has positive effects on cardio‐respiratory fitness showing an increase in oxygen consumption; however, we hypothesize that this effect would be greatly enhanced by increasing the mechanical work done by the legs in SCI rowers.