Real-time muscle fatigue monitoring based on median frequency of electromyography signal

Abstract

Muscle fatigue is one of the important parameters that must be known during physiotherapy. Undetected muscle fatigue for a long time can cause injury to the subject. This paper presents method and algorithm to determine fatigue of muscle during doing some exercise which can be used for real-time monitoring post-stroke rehabilitation patient by using Electromyography (EMG). In general, EMG signal is commonly used for recording muscle activity. Extracted features are purposed to minimize the loss of useful information embedded in the signal with noise. EMG signal has better performance in frequency domain than in time domain. Median Frequency (MDF) is one of the standard parameter to indicate fatigue. Using the proposed method and algorithm, some experimental test show shows that MDF decreases 1 to 3 Hz and the slope of MDF sticks to certain value below zero.