Analysis of Surface Electromyography Signals of the Arm in Adults

Abstract

In human history, medicine has always sought to improve the quality of life of patients with disabilities by designing what is now known as either an assistive device or prosthesis For a person who has an amputated arm, rehabilitation engineers have taken the approach of a myoelectric controlled prosthesis The use the surface electromyography ( technique, to measure the muscle response or electrical activity in response to nerves, is necessary to gather data for this approach Over the years, it has been proven that older patients exhibit a lot of muscle fatigue and, due to this, their sEMG signals will be less stable and show greater burst The signals from the muscles of these patients behave as a dynamic system when activities are performed Nowadays, rehabilitation engineers select motors that are over designed so they can work with a big range number of signals, but this might lead in future problems such as excessive weight in lower and upper limbs The main objective of this research is to learn if a correlation between the deteriorating EMG signal and the age can be found To find this correlation, data analysis of arm aputated adults with similar characteristics was done using Minitab Boxplots, probability plots, Kruskal Wallis test, and Mood’s median test were used to analyze the sets of data The significance level for these test (denoted as α or alpha) is 0 05 This indicates a 5 risk of concluding that a difference exists when there is no actual difference In both tests, Kruskal Wallis test and Mood’s median test, the P value is less than alpha, meaning that the null hypothesis is rejected and is concluded that not all the group medians are equal Because of these results, the correlation to determine how much is deterioration couldn’t be calculated This means that to avoid selecting motors that are over designed another approach must be taken