MyoVibe

Abstract

Incorrect muscle activation can lead to sub-optimal performance, muscle imbalance, and eventually bodily injury. Consequently, assessing muscle activation is important for both excelling in exercise, athletics, and professional sports in general. Existing techniques for assessing muscle activation, such as electromyography, are invasive, requiring needles inserted directly into the muscle or electrodes that have considerable placement requirements (shaving, gels, etc.). This makes them unsuitable for active environments. In addition, factors such as body motion noise that results from the high-impact movements encountered in active sports environments easily corrupt sensor data. This compounds the unsuitability of these systems in the sports and exercise arena. As a result, such systems have been explored mostly in clinical rather than sports-based scenarios. We present MyoVibe, a system for sensing and determining muscle activation in high-mobility, high-impact exercise scenarios. MyoVibe senses and interprets multiple muscle vibration signals obtained from a wearable network of accelerometers to determine muscle activation. By utilizing a diverse feature set combined with the simple yet effective motion artifact mitigation technique, MyoVibe can reduce inertial sensor noise in these high-mobility exercises. As a result, MyoVibe can detect muscle activation with greater than 97% accuracy.