Relations between Driving Electric Vehicle by using Frequency Components of EMG signal and the Operation Feeling

This paper proposes a useful method driving the electric vehicle by EMG signals (electromyographic signals), those frequency components are filtered according to strength of muscular tension. This signal is able to be measured from all the people easily, even physically handicapped people, elderly people and so on. Here, EMG signal contains various frequency components. From this characteristic, we assume that specific bandwidth of frequency components has strong relation with strength of muscular tension and muscular tension becomes stronger as higher frequency component is stronger. Consequently, frequency components of EMG signal are filtered to specified bandwidth for driving the electric vehicle. By our method, user is able to control speed of the electric vehicle by strength of muscular tension. The method of speed control may give user good or bad operation feeling in the meaning of SD (Semantic Differential) method and factor analysis. We experiment on EMG interface in cases of using filters or not to reveal the influence of operation feeling. As a result, it is shown that operation feeling is influenced by speed control