The Usefulness of Mean and Median Frequencies in Electromyography Analysis

Abstract

Rich useful information can be obtained from the muscles and researchers can use such information in a wide class of clinical and engineering applications by measuring surface electromyography (EMG) signals (Merletti & Parker, 2004). Normally, EMG signals are acquired by surface electrodes that are placed on the skin superimposed on the targeted muscle. In order to use the EMG signal as a diagnosis signal or a control signal, a feature is often extracted before performing analysis or classification stage (Phinyomark et al., 2012a) because a lot of information, both useful information and noise (Phinyomark et al., 2012b), is contained in the raw EMG data. An EMG feature is a distinct characteristic of the signal that can be described or observed quantitatively, such as being large or small, spiky or smooth, and fast or slow. Generally, EMG features can be computed in numerical form from a finite length time interval and can change as a function of time, i.e. a voltage or a frequency. They can be computed in several domains, such as time domain, frequency domain, timefrequency and time-scale representations (Boostani & Moradi, 2003). However, frequencydomain features show the better performance than other-domain features in case of the assessing muscle fatigue (Al-Mulla et al., 2012). Mean frequency (MNF) and median frequency (MDF) are the most useful and popular frequency-domain features (Phinyomark et al., 2009) and frequently used for the assessment of muscle fatigue in surface EMG signals (Cifrek et al., 2009).