Analysis of Muscle Fatigue Conditions in Surface EMG Signal with A Novel Hilbert Marginal Spectrum Entropy Method

A transcutaneous acupoint electrical simulation glove for relieving the mental fatigue of crane drivers in real building environment

In the field of construction, the lifting environment of precast parts is more complex, which leads to the driver's fatigue. When the tower crane driver appears driving fatigue, it will appear slow operation response, hoisting precast parts appear abnormal swing, which will endanger the safety of on-site operators. Therefore, this study developed a kind of transcutaneous acupoint electrical stimulation gloves. When the crane driver wears this kind of glove, the good contraction of the glove can make the stimulation electrode closely fit with the three points, so as to perform electrical stimulation on the Neìguān point (PC6), Láogóng point (PC8) and Hégŭ point (L14) of the palm to relieve the driver's driving fatigue. In this study, non-periodic transcutaneous acupoint electrical stimulation (NPTAES) was used to stimulate human acupuncture points. This is different from the traditional periodic transcutaneous acupoint electrical stimulation (PTAES) method for relieving mental fatigue. In addition, this study used hilbert marginal spectral entropy (HMSE) to calculate the heart rate variability (HRV) characteristics of the subjects, so as to detect and analyze the driving fatigue of the drivers. At the same time, the drivers' blinking frequency and electroencephalogram (EEG) characteristics were analyzed comprehensively. The results show that: The NPTAES method used in this study is superior to the PTAES method in alleviating driving fatigue and greatly improves the efficiency of tower crane drivers. Compared to other methods, the HMSE method proposed in this study, when analyzing signals, stronger ability to characterize signal characteristics.

Seismic Signal Analysis Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and Hilbert Transform for Ground Intrusion Activity Classification

The identification of ground intrusion is a key and important technology in the national public security field. In this paper, a novel variational mode decomposition (VMD) and Hilbert transform (HT) is proposed for the classification of seismic signals generated by ground intrusion activities using a seismic sensing system. Firstly, the representative seismic data, including bicycles, vehicles, footsteps, excavations, and environmental noises, were collected through the designed experiment. Secondly, each original datum is decomposed through VMD and five Band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BIMF) are obtained, respectively, which will be used to generate a corresponding marginal spectrum that can reflect the actual frequency component of the signal accurately by HT. Then, three features related to the marginal spectrum, including marginal spectrum energy, marginal spectrum entropy, and marginal spectrum dominant frequency, are extracted for the analysis of the multi-classification using the support vector machine (SVM) classifier with the LIBSVM library. For the sake of testing and verifying the effectiveness of the proposed variational mode decomposition and Hilbert transform (VMD-HT) technique, the evaluation indicators including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score are used and the results are compared with the time domain, frequency domain, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), and empirical wavelet transform (EWT) combined with the HT analysis method. The performance of the VMD-HT method for ground intrusion activity classification provides an average value of 99.50%, 98.76%, 98.76%, and 98.75% for the four evaluation indicators, which are higher than all the other contrasted methods.

Rate of change in longitudinal EMG indicates time course of an individual's neuromuscular adaptation in resistance-based muscle training

An individual's long-term neuromuscular adaptation can be measured through time-domain analyses of surface electromyograms (EMG) in regular resistance-based training. The perceived changes in recruitment, such as those measured during muscle fatigue, can subsequently prolong the recovery time in rehabilitation applications. Thus, by developing quantifiable methods for measuring neuromuscular adaptation, adjuvant treatments applied during neurorehabilitation can be improved to reduce recovery times and to increase patient quality of care. This study demonstrates a novel time-domain analysis of long-term changes in EMG captured neuromuscular activity that we aim to use to develop a quantified performance metric for muscle-based intervention training and optimization of an individual. We measure EMG of endurance and hypertrophy-based resistance exercises of healthy participants over 100 days to identify trends in long-term neuromuscular adaptation. Particularly, we show that the rate of EMG amplitude increase (motor recruitment) is dependent on the training modality of an individual. Particularly, EMG decreases over time with repetitive training – but the rate of decrease is different in hypertrophy, endurance, and control exercises. We found that the EMG peak contraction decreases across all subjects, on average, by 8.23 dB during hypertrophy exercise and 10.09 dB for endurance exercises over 100 days of training, while control participants showed negligible change. This represents approximately 2 dB difference EMG activity when comparing endurance and hypertrophy exercises, and >8 dB change when comparing to our control cases. As such, we show that the slope of the long-term EMG activity is related to the resistance-based exercise. We believe this can be used to identify person-specific performance metrics, and to create optimized interventions using a measured performance baseline of an individual.

A Method to Differentiate Fatiguing Conditions in Surface Electromyography Signals using Instantaneous Spectral Centroid

The nonstationarity measure of surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals provide an index for muscle fatigue conditions. In this paper, a new framework has been proposed for the analysis of sEMG signal using Instantaneous Spectral Centroid (ISC). The novelty of the proposed work is use of topological signal processing method to quantify the nonstationarity of sEMG signal. For this, the signals are recorded from the biceps brachii muscles of 25 healthy subjects in isometric contraction. The analytical signals corresponding to nonfatigue and fatigue segments are computed using Hilbert Transform. Further, topological features such as center of gravity (CoG), triangular area function (TAF) and ISC are calculated from the geometrical representation of a transformed signal. The result indicates the increase of TAF in fatigue condition and the significant right shift of CoG in x-axis for 80% of subjects. Importantly, the ISC estimate is decreased by 17% upon fatiguing for 84% of subjects. The obtained results show statistical significance with p < 0.05. It is observed that the shape parameters are varied in accordance with the changes observed in global characteristics of sEMG signals during muscle fatigue. The preliminary results show that the topological features are able to quantify the nonstationarity in sEMG signal. Therefore, the proposed method can be used as a fatigue index for diagnosing various neuromuscular disorders.Clinical Relevance-This method can be used to establish metrics of muscle fatigue for the benefit of physicians especially in the field of fitness, sports, pre and post-surgery surveillance and rehabilitation.