Identification of Pelvic Floor Muscle Contraction From Non-Invasive Sensors

Urinary incontinence is a global health problem affecting over 200 million people worldwide. This condition is due to pelvic floor muscle dysfunction and can be treated by perineal rehabilitation. Today, biofeedback devices allow to detect and monitor the state of contraction of the pelvic floor muscle in real time. Currently, only devices using probes are available. However, this method is invasive and can be uncomfortable, justifying our proposal of a non-invasive method based on a single bipolar lead of surface electromyography to identify pelvic floor muscle contractions. This method was tested experimentally on some patients, and we obtained an average recall of 89.6% for the pelvic floor muscle. Furthermore, our method proved highly effective reconstruction, with an average correlation coefficient of 0.72 between the ground-truth and the reconstruction of the pelvic floor muscle signals. In addition, the clinical interest of this method is to provide the physiotherapist and patient with an easy-to-use, non-intrusive device for diagnosis and therapy.