Cost Effective way of measuring athlete muscle’s stiffness with the effect of fatigue

Athletes of every type experience fatigue in their muscles during their exercise. Determining the point at which failure will occur is simple, however it could result in injury for the athlete. Typically the point of fatigue is found by the athlete repeating the exercise until they are physically incapable of continuing. While it does not take much to understand the feeling of fatigue, it's more to understand why it occurs. Using shear wave propagation and accelerometers, a model can be depicted of muscle fatigue of an athlete by viewing the strain and velocity of waves propagating through the muscle before, during, and after the lifting of a weight. It has been found that the stiffness found by this surface wave method is in agreement with the research studies done in the past using the Ultrasound and the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) techniques. Stiffness of the biceps increases when the weight is lifted the effect of lifting the weight on the stiffness before and after has been investigated in this paper. This method is a cost effective, minimally non-invasive and an in-vivo method to measure the muscle stiffness which is an important criteria of diagnosing the muscle health. This process demonstrates mechanical engineering techniques that can be applied to and be beneficial to health fields, such as how to maximize muscle efficiency.