Design of a Wireless Distributed Real-time Muscle Fatigue Detection System

Muscle fatigue is an important issue in the field of sports science and rehabilitation medicine and has a great impact on human health and maintenance of normal functioning. electromyography (EMG) contains a direct reflection of muscle activity, and it has become an effective method to achieve quantitative evaluation of muscle fatigue levels through EMG. In this paper, we propose a wireless real-time muscle fatigue evaluation and detection system that can record multiple image sensing data and EMG data of different muscles simultaneously. Several wireless wearable EMG sensors are attached to different muscles on the body. Each EMG sensor features an individual acquisition channel and transmits data through Bluetooth Low Energy. Each EMG sensor features a size of 3 cm × 3 cm × 0.9 cm with a weight of 9.8 gram, and can be wirelessly charged. A fatigue evaluation method based on EMG frequency domain features is proposed and validated on both isometric muscle contraction fatigue and dynamic muscle fatigue. The completely wireless and miniaturized nature of the system ensures usability and flexibility. A muscle fatigue database was built including 3.4 hours recording on 10 subjects.