A Low Noise Capacitive Electromyography Monitoring System for Remote Healthcare Applications

Remote healthcare monitoring (RHM) is an emerging trend in the biomedical field that leverages on the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) to enhance the coverage of healthcare services around the world. An RHM system with the electromyography (EMG) measurement capability has great potential in improving the efficiency of medical treatment and physical therapy for chronic inflammatory myopathies. Conventional EMG measurement is often invasive, complex and require an ever-present medical officer. This paper proposes a capacitive electromyography (CEMG) monitoring system to overcome the limitations of the contact EMG monitoring system by using the capacitive sensing methodology. The system architecture and circuit design are detailed in this paper and the hardware implementation with experimental results are presented. This CEMG monitoring system achieved extremely low noise floor of less than 2 mV. Its performance also highly correlates with the conventional wet contact electrode without requiring any post signal processing. Therefore, this CEMG monitoring system is ideal for remote healthcare monitoring applications.