Biceps brachii surface EMG classification using neural networks

This thesis presents an approach of MATLAB-based system for clinical rehabilitation monitoring application. The main rationale for the development of such a system is that the pattern of the EMG signals elicited may differ depending on the activity of the muscle movement. Therefore, this research aims to study EMG signals elicited from biceps brachii muscle and classify the signal pattern to their respective class of activity. The proposed system consists of two main parts. The first part is about the development of an EMG acquisition platform. This platform consists of three modules; acquisition module, preprocessing module and feature extraction module. The acquisition module is used to acquire EMG signals from the subject. Several signal processing methods are carried out in the preprocessing module, where the EMG signal will undergo a series of processes like filtering, rectification and integration. After preprocessing, the signal is passed to the feature extraction module. In this module, statistical features such as mean, maximum, variance and standard deviation are computed to represent the signal pattern. The second part is regarding EMG pattern classification using neural networks. Feedforward BackPropagation Network (BPN) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) are chosen as the classifiers to classify muscle activities. In the experimentation phase, 30 female subjects took part in this study. They were asked to perform several series of voluntary movement with respect to biceps brachii muscle. The experimental results show that EMG signals of different biceps activity is differed and simple statistical features are sufficient to represent the EMG pattern. The proposed BPN with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm and PNN had achieved an overall classification rate of 88% while BPN with Resilient-Propagation (RP) algorithm achieved an overall classification of 87.11%. With these satisfactory results, the effectiveness of the proposed classifiers in EMG pattern classification problem is proven.