OBJECTIVES Muscle stiffness increases during muscle contraction. The purpose of this study was to determine the strength of the correlation between myotonometric measurements of muscle stiffness and surface electromyography (sEMG) measurements during various levels of voluntary isometric contractions of the biceps brachii muscle. SUBJECTS Eight subjects (four female; four male), with mean age...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the excessive spikes observed in the surface electromyography (sEMG) spectrum recorded during whole-body vibration (WBV) exercises contain motion artifacts and/or reflex activity. The occurrence of motion artifacts was tested by electrical recordings of the patella. The involvement of reflex activity was investigated by analyzing the magnitude ...

Surface Electromyography (sEMG) has been widely used for studying human mastication, due to its ability to non-invasively monitor the activity of muscle groups associated with chewing (Boyar & Kilcast, 1986; Brown, 1994). It is regarded as the “gold standard” for objective measurement of simple parameters relating to chewing behaviour, such as chew rate and strength. Attempts have been made to ...

Parallel isolated word corpora were collected from healthy speakers and individuals with speech impairment due to stroke or cerebral palsy. Surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals were collected for both vocalized and mouthed speech production modes. Pioneering work on disordered speech recognition using the acoustic signal, the sEMG signals, and their fusion are reported. Results indicate tha...

The sensitivity of a simulated surface electromyogram (SEMG) to changes in conduction velocity (CV) of individual motor units was assessed. Changes in the conduction velocity measurement and the median frequency and spectral compression measures of both the amplitude and power spectra of the SEMG were calculated. Results show that motor units close to the electrodes dominate the SEMG signal. Re...

‘‘The course of a movement is nothing else but a projection to the outside of a pattern of excitation taking place in a corresponding setting in the central nervous system‘‘. This citation of Hess (1954, according to Waterland, 1968) has caught my attention since the first day of my studies of the neuro-musculo-skeletal system in kinesiological tasks. Pursuing a bioengineering approach and inve...

A powerful early inhibition is seen in triceps surae after transcutaneous electrical stimulation of the Achilles tendon [tendon electrical stimulation (TES)]. The aim of the present study was to confirm results from surface electromyogram (SEMG) recordings that the inhibition is not wholly or partly due to stimulation of cutaneous afferents that may lie within range of the tendon electrodes. Be...

For the purpose of successfully developing a prosthetic control system, many attempts have been made to improve the classification accuracy of surface electromyographic (SEMG) signals. Nevertheless, the effective feature extraction is still a paramount challenge for the classification of SEMG signals. The relative frequency band energy (RFBE) method based on wavelet packet decomposition was pro...

Background: Surface Electromyography (SEMG) signal has used in monitoring muscle activities. It has been widely applied in many areas, such as body member prosthesis, noise cancellation for braincomputer interface, and robotics. The SEMG acquisition method for collecting the signal with low-noise has extensively investigated in the last decade. The objective of this study is to review the recen...

The aim of this mini-review is to describe the potential application of surface electromyography (sEMG) techniques in aging studies. Aging is characterized by multiple changes of the musculoskeletal system physiology and function. This paper will examine some of the innovative methods used to monitor age-related alterations of the neuromuscular system from sEMG signals. A description of critica...