BioTones: A wearable device for EMG auditory biofeedback

In this paper, we introduce a novel technology to convert bioelectrical signals into sound and its application in biofeedback. The surface electromyogram is adopted as the bioelectrical signal and converted into an auditory signal. The sound conversion occurs inside a wearable device. In general, visual feedback can provide more information than acoustic feedback, however, we assume that the latter can represent bioelectrical signals as well as the visual medium. We have been investigating auditory conversion methods and analyze how they were perceived by several subjects. We also investigated the auditory ability of humans from an acousticopsychological point of view. According to the results of this examination, the acoustic sense has the ability to gather enough information to cognize the bioelectrical signal. Another important point we analyzed was whether a conversion algorithm should map multiple bioelectrical signals into sounds signals at once or sequentially.