Background: Mechanomyography (MMG) has been extensively applied in clinical and experimental practice to examine
muscle characteristics including muscle function (MF), prosthesis and/or switch control, signal processing, physiological
exercise, and medical rehabilitation. Despite several existing MMG studies of MF, there has not yet been a review of these.
This study aimed to determine the current status on the use of MMG in measuring the conditions of MFs.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Five electronic databases were extensively searched for potentially eligible studies
published between 2003 and 2012. Two authors independently assessed selected articles using an MS-Word based form
created for this review. Several domains (name of muscle, study type, sensor type, subject’s types, muscle contraction,
measured parameters, frequency range, hardware and software, signal processing and statistical analysis, results,
applications, authors’ conclusions and recommendations for future work) were extracted for further analysis. From a total of
2184 citations 119 were selected for full-text evaluation and 36 studies of MFs were identified. The systematic results find
sufficient evidence that MMG may be used for assessing muscle fatigue, strength, and balance. This review also provides
reason to believe that MMG may be used to examine muscle actions during movements and for monitoring muscle
activities under various types of exercise paradigms.
Conclusions/Significance: Overall judging from the increasing number of articles in recent years, this review reports
sufficient evidence that MMG is increasingly being used in different aspects of MF. Thus, MMG may be applied as a useful
tool to examine diverse conditions of muscle activity. However, the existing studies which examined MMG for MFs were
confined to a small sample size of healthy population. Therefore, future work is needed to investigate MMG, in examining
MFs between a sufficient number of healthy subjects and neuromuscular patients.
