Sex-Specific Muscle Activation Patterns in Locomotion Across Age

215 participants provided electromyographic data from 13 lower-limb muscles during treadmill walking and running. The dataset includes raw EMG signals, gait event timings, and processed muscle synergy coefficients to investigate sex and age differences in motor control. It supports analysis of modular muscle activation patterns for human locomotion.

Use Cases

• [Analyzing sex differences in muscle synergy modules] based on [hip, knee, and foot dorsiflexor contributions]
• [Comparing motor primitive complexity] based on [time-dependent synergy coefficients across age groups]
• [Modeling gait event timing] based on [touchdown and lift-off data from recorded limbs]
• [Validating motor control theories] based on [non-negative matrix factorization-extracted synergies]
• [Investigating aging effects on locomotion strategies] based on [data from young and older adults]

Strengths

• Dataset includes a substantial sample of 215 participants, enabling robust group comparisons.
• Contains raw, concatenated EMG data alongside processed synergy coefficients and gait event timings, supporting multiple analysis levels.
• Explicitly addresses sex as a biological variable across two age cohorts, a key factor for rigorous science.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as column names, row counts, and specific file formats are not provided in the sources.
• The dataset's last update date is unknown, which may affect reproducibility if underlying code or standards have changed.
• Data collection appears focused on controlled treadmill locomotion, which may limit generalizability to overground or real-world walking.

Provenance

Source

Alessandro Santuz, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Collection Method

Electromyographic recordings from participants during treadmill walking and running, processed via non-negative matrix factorization.