title: Effectiveness of a tongue-placed electrotactile biofeedback to improve ankle force sense following plantar-flexor muscles fatigue.
abstract: To assess the effectiveness of a tongue-placed electrotactile biofeedback system to improve ankle force sense following plantar-flexor muscles fatigue, 11 young healthy adults were asked to perform an isometric contra-lateral force ankle-matching task in two experimental conditions of No fatigue and Fatigue of the plantar-flexor muscles and two conditions of No biofeedback and Biofeedback. The underlying principle of the biofeedback consisted of supplying subjects with supplementary information about the force developed by the plantar-flexor muscles through electrical stimulation of the tongue. Measures of the overall accuracy and the variability of the force ankle-matching performances were determined using the absolute error and the variable error, respectively. Results showed that (1) the Fatigue condition yielded increased absolute and variable errors relative to the No fatigue condition in the No biofeedback condition, whereas (2) no significant difference between the two No fatigue and Fatigue conditions was observed in the Biofeedback condition. These results suggest that subjects were able to integrate augmented sensory information delivered through electrotactile stimulation of the tongue to suppress the adverse effect of plantar-flexor muscles fatigue on ankle force sense.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire TIMC-IMAG, UMR UJF CNRS 5525, Grenoble, France. nicolas.vuillerme@imag.fr
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Vuillerme
authors.forename: Matthieu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Boisgontier
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000843:Ankle Joint / Q000294:innervation / Q000502:physiology*; D001676:Biofeedback, Psychology / Q000295:instrumentation*; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D018763:Muscle Fatigue / Q000502:physiology*; D011312:Pressure; D014059:Tongue; D055815:Young Adult