An Embedded, Eight Channel, Noise Canceling, Wireless, Wearable sEMG Data Acquisition System With Adaptive Muscle Contraction Detection

Wearable technology has gained increasing popularity in the applications of healthcare, sports science, and biomedical engineering in recent years. Because of its convenient nature, the wearable technology is particularly useful in the acquisition of the physiological signals. Specifically, the (surface electromyography) sEMG systems, which measure the muscle activation potentials, greatly benefit from this technology in both clinical and industrial applications. However, the current wearable sEMG systems have several drawbacks including inefficient noise cancellation, insufficient measurement quality, and difficult integration to customized applications. Additionally, none of these sEMG data acquisition systems can detect sEMG signals (i.e., contractions), which provides a valuable environment for further studies such as human machine interaction, gesture recognition, and fatigue tracking. To this end, we introduce an embedded, eight channel, noise canceling, wireless, wearable sEMG data acquisition system with adaptive muscle contraction detection. Our design consists of two stages, which are the sEMG sensors and the multichannel data acquisition unit. For the first stage, we propose a low cost, dry, and active sEMG sensor that captures the muscle activation potentials, a data acquisition unit that evaluates these captured multichannel sEMG signals and transmits them to a user interface. In the data acquisition unit, the sEMG signals are processed through embedded, adaptive methods in order to reject the power line noise and detect the muscle contractions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our sEMG sensor outperforms a widely used commercially available product and our data acquisition system achieves 4.583 dB SNR gain with $98.9784\%$ accuracy in the detection of the contractions.