EMG acquisition

• Main Author: Fatimah Mohamad Kamil
• Other Authors: Tan Boon Tiong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Control and instrumentation::Medical electronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16810
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This report provides a detailed account on producing a prototype for an EMG (Electromyogram) Acquisition System. This system is able to transmit EMG signal wirelessly by Frequency Modulation (FM) transmission. The EMG signal is acquired using surface electrodes as they are not cumbersome to use and can be applied on the skin without the supervision of clinicians. EMG signals in males are generally higher in amplitude compared to females but the signal is also dependant on the underlying fat tissue thickness. Once the signal has been obtained, it goes to the instrumentation amplifier and band-pass filter to the wireless transmitter. The wireless transmitter would send this signal to the receiver module and this goes to the personal computer (PC) sound card via the audio cable. The PC sound card is chosen because it has a readily available analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the muscle signal frequency spectrum falls within the audible range of the human ear. Based on this principle, there is extensive research carried out in areas of acoustic myogram where the patient’s muscle condition can be assessed by the sound of their muscle and comparing it to the muscle sounds in a normal and healthy patient. A Graphic User Interface (GUI) was developed to plot the EMG signal and its fast fourier transform (FFT) to view their frequency content. In this project, the acquired EMG signal is used to control an application even in a noisy environment. As a proof of the concept, SIMULINK models were developed to use the EMG signal to control an ActiveX stopwatch and start video playback.