Development of a Multi-Channel Compact-Size Wireless Hybrid sEMG/NIRS Sensor System for Prosthetic Manipulation

It is evident that surface electromyography (sEMG)-based approaches have inherent difficulty in coping with modern dominant applications of clinical diagnosis and human machine interface such as prosthetic manipulation. This paper presents a hybrid sensor to attentively overcome the difficulty with a clinical purpose of simultaneously acquiring electrophysiological, hemodynamic, and oxidative metabolic information of muscle activity, also with front-end conditioning circuit and Bluetooth module integrated and packaged. A multi-channel compact-size wireless hybrid sEMG/near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) acquisition system is developed, forming a platform to demonstrate individual sEMG and NIRS measurement capabilities, and their combination. Extensive experiments are carried out to explore sensor functionality based on the sEMG, NIRS, and their combination, convincingly addressing the capabilities meeting their commercial or state-of-the-art counterparts. Future work is targeted to extract the sEMG/NIRS sensor-based muscular fatigue which plays a crucial role in biomedical and clinical applications.