An integrated surface EMG data acquisition system for sports medicine applications

This paper presents the design and implementation of a PC-based integrated surface electromyogram (SEMG) data acquisition system for the measurement of electrical activity of muscles, efficiency of electrical activity, explosion power (response velocity), and fatigue degree. These parameters are most imperative to physical assessment in sports medicine. The system´s hardware consists of four basic units which are detection units, signal conditioning unit, signal processing unit and multi-channel analog to digital converter unit. The graphical user interface displays the EMG signal waveform and extracted parameters. The experiments validated the linear relationship between muscle electrical activity and tension level. Our results show that male subjects are more efficient than female subjects in using lesser energy for a given tension level. However, female subjects exhibited lower explosion power (faster response) than male subjects.