Human breathing assessment using Electromyography signal of respiratory muscles

Breathing is one of the human physiological activities that catch the interest of researchers especially in the area of medical diagnosis and human physiological performance. Mostly, the measurement and data are in form of pressure and volume variables of air intake and outflow. However, using airflow pressure and volume require installment of certain sensor usually on subject's mouth which could discomfort the subject. Another possible method for assessing the breathing pattern is through human respiratory muscles, which are via electromyography signal. In this paper, experiment is done on acquiring the electromyography signal from four respiratory muscles namely sternocleidomastoid, scalene, intercostal muscle and diaphragm with subjects performing four different breathing tasks. Analysis-of-variance test has been done on the Electromyography (EMG) feature data of the four muscles for the four breathing tasks. Results of ANOVA analysis, show that the p-values has a significant different in the four breathing tasks for each muscle.