Wireless Low Energy System Architecture for Event-Driven Surface Electromyography

The development of surface ElectroMyoGraphy (sEMG) acquisition system having an optimal trade-off between accuracy, resolution, low dimension and power consumption is a hot topic today. The event-driven Average Threshold Crossing (ATC) technique applied to the sEMG signal allows the reduction of both complexity and power consumption of the acquisition board. The paper presents an sEMG acquisition system, based on this approach, and shows the advantages of the ATC in this field. A framework for developing bio-signal ATC-processing applications is provided, enabling the comparison with a standard sEMG sampling approach. Both system performance and power consumption analyses are carried out to obtain promising results in terms of real-time behavior and energy saving. As a sample application, the system is employed in the control of Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) in way to verify the behavior of the ATC approach in such application.