Development of a Real-Time Guidance System for Matched Placement of Surface Electrodes in a Repeated Measures Design

Recording electromyography (EMG) data from the upper limb plays a huge role in sensorimotor investigations. Such investigations may require a repeated measures design wherein the experimenter has to place surface electrodes on locations matched to that of the previous sessions. However, this is prone to human error, and the resulting locations decided by the experimenter across sessions might not be precisely matched. This might lead to differences in the corresponding cortical correlates, the estimate of which is not yet known. No tool currently exists that can assist the experimenter in the above problem. We propose a novel tool, Myolocate, that will use a webcam to identify the electrodes placed in the human arm and their corresponding locations with respect to well-known anatomical points in the arm in the first session of the experiment and guide the experimenter, in real-time, to quickly identify the electrode locations in subsequent sessions without having to go through the measurement of anatomical reference to resolve the electrode positions of the previous session. The proposed tool will ease locating electrode position and optimize the data acquisition process.