And he focuses on the neural controls of muscles and he uses a neuro-mechanical approach and

one of the goals of his laboratory is to understand the origin of the muscle coordination by using

the electromyography and other techniques and he has published more than 170 publications

and books after.

So for us it's an honor to have Francois here. I had the pleasure to meet him personally

when we spent a week together in Brisbane in Australia. It was very nice. We did some

very good research and some nice questions arose from those time. And so I think he will

also talk about those studies today and we're very looking forward to your presentation.

So Francois, the floor is all yours.

Thank you. Thank you, Alessandro, for the invitation and for the introduction. So can

you see my slides full screen?

Yes.

Okay. Perfect. So hi everyone. So today my presentation will be divided in two parts.

So in the first part, I will present some work where we tried to provide evidence of

individual movement or I should say, muscle coordination signatures. And then I will present

a second stream of research where we develop a neural framework based on the activity of

spinal motor neurons to assess movement control. And actually our ultimate goal is to use this

approach to provide evidence that these signatures actually reflect the existence of different

neural strategies between participants.

So first I need to introduce what I consider to be a signature. So I do define a signature

as distinctive patterns or characteristics by which someone can be identified. And as

you know, using relatively simple biometric identifiers, algorithms have been developed

that identify participants or individuals based on their face, ears, or fingerprints.

But we believe that differences between individuals go well beyond physical characteristics. And

there are some motor signatures. And so you have here two examples of motor signatures,

the handwriting style and the walking style. So first if we focus on this study, so it's

an old study where they asked participants to write a sentence with either their right

hand, their right hand with the wrist immobilized, their left hand holding the pen between the

teeth and with the foot. So obviously when you write with your teeth or with your foot,

the quality of the writing is impaired. But what is amazing is that you keep your writing

style. So actually this experiment illustrates the concept of motor equivalence. And within

this context, it means that regardless of the effector that you use, you keep the same

writing style. And as you know, you can also, we can also recognize friends by their walk.

So it's not new. There is this sentence in a story play from Shakespeare. I don't know

him by his gate, he's a friend. There is also this book, The Theory of Walking written by

a famous French writer, Honoré de Balzac, where he described different walking styles.

So there is a series of recent experiments providing the evidence of the existence of

individual movement signatures identified from kinematic or kinetic features. So you

have this one, for example, so they measured the ground reaction force patterns in 128

participants while they walk. And so you have here the data for 11 participants. In black,

you have average ground reaction force pattern. So it's the same on each panel. And in gray,

you have individual ground reaction force patterns. And so you can see some obvious

differences between participants. For example, if you compare participant three with participant

31 or participant 31 with participant 54, etc. And so using support vector machines

for pattern recognition using machine learning algorithm, they showed that they can identify

participants based on their ground reaction force patterns. Participants can be assigned

so these patterns can be assigned to the correct participants in more than 99% of the cases.

And what is amazing is that they did retest a group of participants one year later, and

they were still able to identify participants based on these patterns. And so there are

other studies using over kinematic or kinetic features providing the same similar outcomes