Applicability of facial emg in hci and voiceless communication

This paper discusses the speech related information in the facial EMG for applications such as human computer interface. The primary objective of this work is to investigate the use of facial EMG as a voiceless communication medium or to drive computer based equipment by people who are unable to speak. Subjects were asked to pronounce the five English vowels with no acoustic output (voiceless). Three independent EMG signals were acquired from three facial muscles as ‘voiceless’ EMG activations. In order to classify and recognize each vowels based on EMG, RMS of the recorded signals were estimated and used as parametric/feature inputs to a neural network.