Editorial: Somatosensory Integration in Human Movement: Perspectives for Neuromechanics, Modelling and Rehabilitation

Abstract

Paraphrasing They move thanks to a series of coordinated muscles contractions ultimately driven by the firing of alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord. The activity of these neurons, emerges as the result of the interplay between the motor commands generated across the central nervous system (CNS) and the information about the state of the body and of the environment The latter, harvested by a multitude of different sensory organs. The integration of efferent and afferent information determines, at the level of the motor neuron, whether or not an action potential will be produced at any point in time Sensory information influences also the behavior of several other structures across the central nervous system. An alteration of the sensory organs (or neurons) themselves, or of the interpretation that the CNS makes of the information they provide, can have profound consequences on the aptness of an individual to carry out a motor task. This has obvious repercussions on their capability of interacting with the environment. Taken together, those considerations suggest that research on somatosensory integration should follow an interdisciplinary approach, whose methods range from experiments to modeling and whose topics span from basic physiology to rehabilitation, from prosthesis control to biologically-inspired robotics, from human-computer interaction to ergonomics.