A Low-Cost Wireless Multichannel Surface EMG Acquisition System

Abstract

Electromyogram (EMG) signals have attracted much attention and have been applied widely. EMG signals have been used to evaluate the functional status of skeletal muscles. The commercial EMG acquisition systems are costly; so many researchers have provided low-cost solutions. Although the wireless acquisition systems are realized, the transmission speed is not sufficient for high-sampling and multichannel measurement. The purpose of this article is to implement a low-cost and wireless surface EMG acquisition system supporting high-sampling and multichannel measurement. Using wearable EMG sensors combined with a microcontroller unit and a Wi-Fi module, the measured surface EMG signal samples can be forwarded immediately to the host for further processing and additional applications. Besides, the proposed system is validated by applying the commercial EMG detection system. The results show that all the correlation coefficients are over 0.8, which represent moderate-to-high relative agreement between the commercial and the proposed system.