Simultaneous measurement of ultrasonic echo and electromyogram to monitor muscle state

Electromiogram (EMG) is an useful technique to measure activity of human muscle. However, it is not easy to deploy EMG sensors with portable sensor networks (e.g. body area network), as it requires exact positioning of probes and noise issue. The authors propose ultrasonic echo based human muscle activity monitoring to overcome these issues. In this paper, activity of muscle of upper arm is measured by ultrasonic echo and EMC simultaneously. The results show good agreement among EMG, commercial ultrasonic echo equipment, and portable ultrasonic echo sensor. Consequently a possibility to measure human muscle activities with portable ultrasonic echo devices is shown.